Our Favorite Books of 2018

Jose Antonio Vargas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose mother put him on a plane to the United States from the Philippines when he was twelve years old, came out as an undocumented immigrant in 2011.

The unbearable anxiety of living in the shadows, which he vividly describes in his memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (HarperCollins), has occasionally driven Vargas to flirt with disaster. After founding the group Define American to advocate for immigrants like himself, he once called Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ask what the government planned to do with him. (“No comment” was the answer, he writes.)

In the spirit of “radical transparency,” which became his guiding philosophy after he went public, Vargas answered truthfully to a question by an airport security agent near the border in Texas, declaring that he was in the country unlawfully. That led to his detention in a holding cell with a group of terrified Central American children. (Friends in high places helped get him out.)

While some people saw that particular episode as a self-aggrandizing stunt, in this book Vargas gives us the backstory—how his sense of displacement and the identity crisis it caused drove him to extremes. His personal story is the story of America’s contradictions.

Sitting in detention in Texas, Vargas writes, he realized that America’s immigration system is not “broken,” as politicians are so fond of saying. Instead, it serves its intended purpose—reinforcing power, delineating an arbitrary line between insiders and outsiders, “haves” and “have-nots.” In Dear America, Vargas describes how he found out he was undocumented at age sixteen, when he applied for a driver’s permit, and was turned away by a disgusted Department of Motor Vehicles employee. “Don’t ever come back here,” she hissed.

Vargas was lucky. He landed with relatives in California who lived on the edge of a wealthy school district. His teachers, and the wealthy parents of his friends, whom he copiously thanks, helped raise him.

Venture capitalist Jim Strand paid for Vargas’s college education—launching a scholarship program Vargas now helps direct. Vargas chose San Francisco State, which didn’t require standardized tests, so he didn’t have to disclose his immigration status.

He built a brilliant journalism career, winning the Pulitzer as part of a team at The Washington Post. And yet, through it all, he suffered constant, wracking anxiety.

Vargas “came out” twice—once as gay, which got him tossed out of his home by his conservative, Catholic grandfather, then as undocumented. He disclosed his immigration status in an article published by The New York Times, after his editors at the Post, his journalistic home, accepted, edited, and fact-checked it—and then spiked it. The paper’s ombudsman explored that decision in a column headlined, “Why Did The Post Deport Jose Antonio Vargas’s Story?”

Over and over, in an effort to exorcise his own demons, Vargas has put himself on the line. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly told Vargas, “You don’t have an entitlement to be here.” Right before another Fox appearance, Tucker Carlson told him, “I should have called ICE . . . . That would have been good TV.”

That sort of casual cruelty has, unfortunately, become the norm in our Fox News culture.

Vargas’s honesty, sincerity, and simple insistence on being himself shine a light of humanity in the darkness, reminding us of America’s better self.

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive.

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Whatever history will call 2018—the Year of the Woman, or the Year of the Man, or the Year of the Immigrant—for those who lived through it, it felt more like the Year of Rancor and Dehumanization. One possible sane and restorative response is to turn to poetry, which allows us to find quieter spaces and retexturize the fineness of being that gets trampled in noisier arenas.

Here are three poets who speak with stunning attentiveness to our most urgent shared concerns.

Indictus (Noemi Press) is a most original book of poems about male brutality and female resiliency. The title is Latin for “not said” or “unheard,” and the poems do the work of saying and hearing, bearing witness to violence but also to assertively imaginative and feminist responses to such acts.

The poems are, in effect, heroic performances, creations of image and speech that work against victimization and towards a woman-hewn construct of the self. Somehow Eilbert manages to do all of this in a din of rage, which I find singularly brilliant, and yes,

From a series of poems in a section entitled “The Men Fall Away,” she writes: “When I ask / men in the pews to stand and fix their laps, faith is a spotted / garment, a material to boast certain rupture. / The blank wind sails innuendos elsewhere, a blade / made dull by prescription . . . / I quaked my flesh and smeared / like a white donkey left for the buzzing dark. I wrote / like I was waiting. Face to face with memory, the letter / misses. I saw I was ready to make use of loss.”

Fatimah Asghar’s debut poetry collection, If They Come for Us (One World), traces the lasting effects of forced migration. As an American-Pakistani Muslim woman, orphaned as a child, Asghar’s poems are intimate but epic stories of women, mostly, that go otherwise unrecorded.

Seven poems in the collection bear the same title, “Partition,” referring to the 1947 division of British India, where, as the epigraph to her book notes, many millions fled ethnic cleansings and retributive genocides. She considers the displaced, the spurned, the exiled, the ones who have lost their homeland, and how “the country no one wants creeps / into [their] every sentence.”

I also recommend reading two books published this year by Tom Sleigh—a book of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press), and a book of essays about his journalistic work in Africa and the Middle East, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press).

It’s a rich experience to read Sleigh’s poems alongside his essays, which engage with the way his poetic mind bears witness to human suffering. As with Eilbert and Asghar’s work, it attends to the texture of things and is at once devastating and—miraculously—restorative.

Jules Gibbs, a poet and professor of literature at Syracuse University, is poetry editor for The Progressive.

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As a student now in college, I’ve spent many semesters learning about waves of feminism throughout the last century—the suffragettes, the birth control movement, Betty Friedan and her fight for equal rights in the 1960s. But it often felt like these powerful women were packaged with a neat little bow, in terms of their places in history.

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove Press) by Michelle Dean tries to unravel that packaging, by shining a light on the lives of ten influential women: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm.

These are women whose significance has been lost in the writing of our history books. They are outspoken and witty, and hearing their stories is liberating in and of itself, for a young woman like me. There’s Parker, who was driven to the top of Vanity Fair with her “acidic” writing, and Didion, who steadily persisted in her career during the New Journalism movement to bring us strong narratives from different corners of society.

Olivia Herken, a journalism student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an editorial intern at The Progressive

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This year, nonfiction has been my jam! I adore memoir blended with journalism because it somehow seems more honest, or at least real, than just one or the other. Gross Anatomy: Dispatches from the Front (and Back) (Penguin Group) by Mara Altman cannot get more real. She investigates the human body in a fun and fascinating way, and my favorite part is where she talks to a butt doctor about sphincters for hours and discovers humans actually have two each, and we all basically have hemorrhoids.

Repeal the 8th (Amazon Digital Services) is an anthology of essays, poetry, and art having to do with the successful political campaign to legalize abortion in Ireland this year. Crowd-funded and written by leading Irish thinkers and writers, the works are edited by Irish Times journalist Una Mullally. They capture a spectacular moment of rage and change that was one of the few lights in a dark year worldwide for women and our reproductive health.

American Hate: Survivors Speak Out (The New Press) edited by Arjun Singh Sethi is, sadly, a book that just gets more important with every passing atrocity. The survivors of the title include a real estate agent in Montana doxxed by The Daily Stormer, and the young women on the Portland light rail train who were verbally assaulted by Jeremy Christian before he murdered two men who defended them. I appreciate hearing directly from survivors, listening as they testify to their suffering—and to their ways of recovering and practices of resistance.

Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir (Random House) by Liana Finck is a gorgeous piece of work, part graphic novel and part memoir by The New Yorker cartoonist and Instagram star. It’s full of sadness and sweetness, and hit me in the part of me that feels like a weirdo most of the time. This book is all about creativity and finding your voice, and is subversive in quiet ways that fill me with hope. A powerful voice, in a magical form.

Maeve Higgins is a columnist for The Progressive.

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The administration of Donald Trump has celebrated its efforts to “liberate” public lands, especially to extractive industries and corporate development. It’s opened millions of federally owned acres to oil and gas companies, including approving the first Arctic offshore oil-drilling development in U.S. waters.

In his book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer (Temple University Press), Steven Davis, a political science professor at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, takes on the movement to privatize. Public support for national and state parks and other public lands is high, he observes, but the privatizers are loud and well heeled, and they are threatening our natural and cultural heritage.

Davis details the Sagebrush Rebellion, Wise Use Movement, and illegal 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He recounts how, since the gains of the Tea Party in 2010, opponents of public lands have garnered support in state and federal legislatures. “What was previously seen as the intemperate agitation of fringe activists is now the standard stuff of political platforms, floor debates, and campaign speeches,” he writes.

Davis provides a useful history of public lands management, and systematically defangs the arguments of privatizers. He does the hard work of engaging with the opposition, and then proceeds to flay them with a lightsaber of ecological, historical, and economic data. He exposes the profound distaste privatizers share for democratic, political process, and their misplaced faith in market-based economics.

What they offer the American public, he writes, “is pretty thin gruel: the bitter medicine of ‘market discipline,’ a lot of ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and $300 tickets for Disney’s ‘Yellowstone Experience.’ ”

Davis does not glorify public lands management, and describes ways it has failed. But in the end, he puts forth a convincing argument that public land agencies do a pretty good job. Sure, it’s a messy, political process, but his important book also shows public land management as a progressive strategy: rational, responsive, and science-based. In a world full of tempestuous opinionating and the undermining of democracy for private gain, this is a welcome respite.

Mrill Ingram is online media editor at The Progressive.

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If someone were to ask me for a primer on the modern progressive movement, I’d tell them to read The Progressive. Beyond that, I might refer them to Bernie Sanders’s new book, Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance (Thomas Dunne Books), which recaps battles following the Vermont Senator’s close bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

The tension is captured early as Sanders recalls his role in helping draft the most progressive platform in the party’s history. It included planks to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, tax carbon emissions and invest in alternative energy, abolish the death penalty, pass comprehensive immigration reform, and protect workers from the predations of their employers. But, as he notes, party insiders were able to kill a call for Medicare for All.

Throughout his career, Sanders has met with both smashing success and fierce internal opposition for holding tight to a progressive vision. His mantra is as clear as his challenge. “Progressive ideas are now mainstream in America. That’s what the people want,” he writes at one point. “Further, a progressive agenda is not only good public policy, it is what winning campaigns are all about.” (See book excerpt, page 51.)

Perhaps the best new book I read in 2018 was by one of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, and Transcendence (Penguin Press) is a provocative look at the power of psychedelic drugs to improve how people’s minds work. He even argues that drugs like LSD and psilocybin (both of which he samples as part of his research) can push people’s political perspectives to the left, by helping erode rigid and engrained processes of thought.

One research team found that the recurring use of psychedelics “positively predicted liberal political views, openness, and nature relatedness, and negatively predicted authoritarian political views.” Tune in, Turn On, Become a Progressive.

It wasn’t until 2009, while visiting a genealogical library run by the Mormons in Salt Lake City, that journalist Bill Sizemore discovered that his not-so-distant relatives owned other human beings. His great-great-great-grandfather, Daniel Sizemore, was the proud owner of at least sixteen slaves, the descendants of whom still share his surname.

Sizemore set out to unearth his past and connect with these descendants. The result is Uncle George and Me: Two Southern Families Confront a Shared Legacy of Slavery (Brandylane). It serves as both an impressive work of history (The Progressive excerpted part of his chapter on Reconstruction online) and a moving account of the possibilities of redemption and forgiveness.

“The story of race is the story of America,” Sizemore writes. “I believe it is the responsibility of all Americans who care about the future of our nation to come to grips with it.”

The most enjoyable new book I read this year was by Progressive contributor Maeve Higgins. It’s called Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else (Penguin Books). Higgins, an Irish transplant who has performed as a comic all over the world and also writes for such outlets as The New York Times, is both witty and wise. Her stories are about real people and real situations. She gets assaulted by dolphins, falls for a shelter dog, ponders the qualities she wants in a husband, and reflects on her relationships with other people’s children.

These seem like light topics, but Higgins infuses them with meaning. One story recounts her dilemma in doing a podcast on immigration that she promised would be super fun—and having to face the heartbreaking reality of the stories she sets out to tell.
“Reviewing my material,” she writes, “I could see there was a series of voices, real and urgent, bursting out with stories that I knew were not told enough. The ice-cold gap between reality and entertainment was one I could not bridge.” And yet, somehow, she does.

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

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Howard Zinn taught us that there are many ways to tell the American story, and that the best ways to tell it are only now surfacing from scholars breaking from the elites who often write the first draft of history. University of Rhode Island labor historian Erik Loomis, one of the great chroniclers of working-class struggle, proves Zinn right in A History of America in Ten Strikes (The New Press), a groundbreaking book on the role that strikes have played in shaping not just the labor movement but the American experience.

Some of the labor disputes that Loomis examines—the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike in Michigan—are well remembered. Others are more obscure. Yet this book brings them all to life.

Loomis is at his best when he invites us to consider the role that worker uprisings played in the great pivot points in American history. He reminds us of the New England “mill girls” who challenged the rise of capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century, and the southern slaves who rebelled against human bondage. He introduces us to the immigrant laborers of succeeding generations. He recalls shows of solidarity and enlightened internationalism, as well as the moments when movements have been divided by petty politics and potent fearmongering.

Recent decades have been hard on the labor movement, as Loomis acknowledges. But Loomis’s faithful re-creation of the moments when workers and their unions achieved transformative progress makes a convincing argument that there are chapters yet to be written about the forward march of labor. Loomis puts everything in perspective, developing a narrative flow that blends political, economic, and cultural insights into a full picture of class struggle in America.

It is this knowing yet optimistic vision that makes this book of history such a vital statement for the present moment and for the better future that workers will claim—with heads and hands and hearts and picket signs that declare On Strike!

John Nichols, a contributing writer for The Progressive, covers politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

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I’d dismissed Omarosa Manigault Newman as the ludicrous Apprentice’s TV villainess. But not long ago, I encountered Omarosa at the premiere of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9. In person, she was charming and smart, talking with a policy wonk’s insight. When Omarosa asked a journalist if he was recording her, I interjected, “Are you taping him?” She leaned forward, quipping: “Please speak into my earring.”

Omarosa, who previously worked in the Clinton Administration, was hired by Trump as the Office of Public Liaison’s communications director, after establishing herself as his biggest fan and defender. Here she is envisioning the future in a 2016 Frontline documentary: “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

She went on, of course, to get drummed out of the Trump Administration and write a tell-all book about her experience in the White House, buttressed by the release of secretly recorded tapes damaging to Trump. So after meeting her, I decided to read Omarosa’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House (Gallery Books).

Unhinged is a good read. Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff’s exposés were meticulously researched, but Unhinged is a behind-the-scenes firsthand account by a tattletale. As she reminds readers throughout her confessional, “I’d known [Trump] since the first day of shooting The Apprentice in September 2003, and we’d grown closer ever since.” This gave Omarosa a unique vantage point on what she calls “the cult of Trumpworld.”

Omarosa’s most troubling assertions are about Trump’s physical and mental deterioration from The Apprentice’s heyday—or, as she puts it, how “the blade had been dulled.” In the Oval Office, she writes, the President’s temper was “terrifying to watch” and his attention scattered. He couldn’t remember bullet points and had trouble saying big words. She partially blames Trump’s decline on his enormous Diet Coke consumption, citing a study linking it to “dementia and increased risk of stroke.”

The informer also skewers other Trumpworld denizens, including Donald’s older daughter, Ivanka, who she says “uses his obsession with her” to her advantage. She describes Anthony Scaramucci’s “girly cry” when he was fired. And she predicts that Melania will dump Trump once he leaves office.

Omarosa confesses she “had a blind spot where Trump was concerned.” Rising from humble roots in Youngstown, Ohio, the lure of wealth and power compelled her to turn a blind eye to Donald’s defects, including his racism. (She says she eventually heard a tape of him using the N-word.)

Now that Trump has dismissed her as “a low life” and a “dog,” Omarosa, ever the opportunist, today tries capitalizing on being anti-Trump. But can someone long derided as a “race traitor” and who has always acted expediently reinvent herself as a resistance leader?

Bill Maher may have put it best last August, calling Omarosa “our asshole now.”

Ed Rampell, The Progressive’s man in Hollywood, is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic.

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Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War (University of Illinois Press) by Ian Rocksborough-Smith is a scholarly book that highlights the role of public history in the movement for civil rights, as documented by teachers, writers, librarians, and archivists on Chicago’s South Side. Of particular note is Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, now in Chicago’s Washington Park. The first museum of its kind, it was started in 1961 with a mission to “promote understanding and inspire appreciation” of the experiences of African American histo

ry, culture, and art.

I grew up on Chicago’s South Side and I remember many visits to the nearby home of my mother’s friends Margaret and Charles Burroughs to see what was then called the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art in their South Michigan Avenue living room. In 1973, it moved to its current location and, since Burroughs’s death in 2010, has continued as a nonprofit community institution and Smithsonian Affiliate.

Philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In this case, this book helps to celebrate those who worked to keep alive the memory of an all-too-often buried past.

The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds, and Riches of Latin America During World War II (St. Martin’s Press) by Mary Jo McConahay tells stories from a little-known battlefield of the Second World War—Latin America. Beginning in the 1930s, both Axis and Allied powers sought to control both the resources and the “hearts and minds” of the countries of Central and South America. “In the run-up to the war,” she writes, “the Latin American region was up for grabs.”

McConahay brings a wealth of personal experience as a journalist in Central America for over three decades, informed by the stories of her parents, both World War II-era U.S. Navy veterans. The book also examines the “ratlines” that ferried escaping Nazis out of Europe to South America because the United States and the Vatican saw them as important potential allies in the coming Cold War against communism.

McConahay draws connections between this dark chapter of our history and what she saw years later as a reporter during the wars of the 1980s. “The fascists of Europe,” she explains, “possessed characteristics in common with the authoritarians of Latin America.” She calls the events in her book “the taproot of issues we face today.”

The Young C.L.R. James: A Graphic Novelette (PM Press) gives a new generation of readers a glimpse into the early years of the twentieth-century Pan-Africanist revolutionary writer C.L.R. James (1901-1989). Illustrated by Milton Knight and edited by Lawrence Ware and Paul Buhle, this small book recalls the early life of the Trinidadian activist, best known for his 1938 book Black Jacobins, a history of the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Paul Buhle, himself a radical historian, is author of the classic 1988 biography of James, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary (reissued last year in an expanded version with an afterword by Ware). Buhle has in recent years worked with other writers and artists to create a series of graphic or “comix” biographies of radical figures, including Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Johnny Appleseed, Robin Hood, and even Jesus Christ (Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith).

The Young C.L.R. James is a worthy addition to this oeuvre. “How could it be that James, the son of an obscure schoolteacher and a novel-reading mother, a rebellious and unwilling scholar, could grow into this stature?” Buhle and Ware ask in their introduction. “There are many answers. But these comic pages provide clues nowhere else grasped.”

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

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I read two sports books this year that check absolutely every box in terms of providing a hidden history of the past and an illumination of the present.

The first is We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality (Praeger) by Louis Moore. It is truly less a “sports book” than a deep excavation into the collision between the civil rights movement and the world of sports. I thought this was an area of history in which I was well versed. I was wrong.

By doing an extensive dive into archival research, particularly the often-overlooked black press of the postwar period, Moore uncovers scores of small examples of the ways in which sports played a critical, if not decisive, role in cracking open the Jim Crow system. These are stories of black athletes who refused to play in front of segregated audiences and black fans who boycotted events because they would not be treated like second-class citizens.

By exercising their economic power as well as the power of pickets and protest, black sports fans and athletes took the fight to city after city—and small town to small town—often at great personal risk, before figures like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had emerged. This battle intensified in the early 1960s, and every fight was a harbinger of things to come. Under Lou Moore’s pen, this history is readable, crackling, and eye-opening.

My other book of choice is The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created (Harper) by Jane Leavy. This is simply the best sports biography I’ve ever read. Leavy flips back and forth from Ruth’s Baltimore childhood to a 1927 barnstorming tour across the country. In this tour, Ruth—accompanied by teammate Lou Gehrig—reached thousands of people, including Negro League fans and future Japanese baseball legend Kenichi Zenimura.

But Leavy has an even greater thesis than just telling Ruth’s story. She outlines and convincingly makes the case that Ruth put down the template for modern celebrity. If you want to understand the Kardashians and their effect on our culture, you have to understand Babe Ruth—his neediness, his use and misuse of new technologies, and his ability to connect with people using a combination of love and desperation.

Leavy has taken a subject who has been written about in voluminous fashion and remakes him to the point that it felt for me like I was reading about the Babe for the first time.

David Zirin is The Progressive’s sports columnist.