favorite books.jpg

Our Favorite Books of 2022

What we read, loved, and learned from over the past year.

Paul Buhle

For at least a century, leftwing activists, thinkers, and writers of every variety have been trying to connect the skeins of activity by the left across continents and varied populations. For at least a half-century, scholars have set themselves to explore those connections by conducting economic, political, ethnographic, and linguistic research. In Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press), Christina Heatherton offers—in our troubled world with so many defeats for the left and popular movements—a vindication of sorts. Things come together from time to time and in many special places.

One of those places is Mexico, from the 1910s to the 1930s. That this is a “global place” of the left is news that reached the world of political research rather slowly, in bits and pieces, rather than something resembling a unified whole. Many world travelers, caught up in the excitement of the Russian Revolution, arrive and leave, by necessity or by choice. Some are on their way to great adventures, some are winding down, and some—mostly Mexicans—draw upon the currents to create something fresh, Mexican, and global.

But perhaps it helps a little to explain, as Heatherton does, that the Mexican Revolution arrives after a century of intensive invasions—notably from the United States and France—and the equally horrifying abuse of Indigenous populations by Mexican leaders to create a modern, industrial society.

The events in Russia in 1917, the vision offered by Vladimir Lenin of global emancipation, naturally strikes home in the more developed parts of the Global South. More anarchist than socialist, more peasant-based than proletarian, the Mexican left was unsuited in some ways for the elaborate forms of political socialism in the European movements. But it was, partly for that reason, open to experiments and artistic projects in ways beyond European (and North American) perception.

Thus we can travel, in these pages, from anarchist martyr Ricardo Flores Magón, who dies from mistreatment in prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, to visiting Russian feminist and communist Alexandra Kollontai, to Los Angelena Dorothy Healey, and fine artist Elizabeth Catlett, who see resistance and rebellion from the outside, but also, as collaborators with Mexican activists and artists, from the inside as well. It is a grand sweep, richer in details than this reviewer can easily convey.

Paul Buhle, a historian of the left, is co-editor of ¡Brigadistas! a graphic novel on the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, drawn by Anne Timmons.

Ruth Conniff

In The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible (Penguin Press), New Yorker war correspondent Luke Mogelson comes back from covering Afghanistan and Syria to follow homegrown militias as they foment unrest in Michigan during the pandemic. Then he journeys to Minnesota, to the protests and violent backlash against Black Lives Matter demonstrators after the police murder of George Floyd.

With a war reporter’s instinct, Mogelson puts himself in the middle of every significant U.S. conflict of the last several years, from the face-off between the Boogaloo Bois and Antifa in Portland, Oregon, to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, when he stands on the Senate floor among a handful of looters as Capitol police politely encourage the mob to leave.

Mogelson documents our country’s dangerous descent into chaos and violence as rightwing conspiracy theory moves from the margins to the mainstream of Republican politics.

Official complicity with the pro-Trump mob is an accelerator of that downward trajectory, he suggests.

There’s no question which side Mogelson is on. Unlike civil wars in other countries, where the cause of grievance is clear, “Were large-scale violence to erupt in the United States,” he writes, “it would be something different: a war fueled not by injury but by delusion.”

Mogelson spends some time on the unhelpfulness of white Antifa activists who turn to property destruction to the dismay of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. But he also expresses appreciation for young antifascists who take the threat posed by rightwing extremists seriously, comparing them to European antifascists during the Second World War, whose motto was “They shall not pass.”

He describes Proud Boys running through the streets of Washington, D.C., ready to commit mayhem, who round a corner and are brought up short by a group of antifascists. “A few dozen Americans dared or bothered to square off against the Patriots as they ran roughshod over Washington, D.C.,” he writes. “On L Street, though, that was enough. They did not pass.”

Ruth Conniff is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the state news website, the Wisconsin Examiner. Her book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, was published by The New Press in July 2022.

Emilio Leanza

In 1933, long before President Donald J. Trump provoked a crowd of thousands to storm the U.S. Capitol, a group of influential Wall Street bankers and wealthy businessmen allegedly devised a plan to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Known later as the Business Plot, the scheme involved holding members of Congress at gunpoint by recruiting an army of veterans, who would then install a pro-capitalist, anti-New Deal regime. Much like Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, they envisioned the putsch being led by a valiant dictator, someone who could rouse the troops and get the job done.

So they contacted Smedley Darlington Butler, a Marine Corps general who was involved in nearly every American imperial excursion of his time, from the seizure of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, to repressing anti-colonial activists amid China’s Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and overseeing the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915. Butler, who knew firsthand how to engineer a coup, seemed like the perfect candidate for orchestrating one at home.

What the would-be plotters did not account for is that Butler, by the time he had retired in 1931, had become a staunch critic of precisely the kind of anti-democratic meddling that they envisioned. “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers,” he said in a 1933 speech, before publishing a critique of militarism titled War Is a Racket. “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Today, unlike the generals who are remembered for their exploits on the battlefield, such as Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, Butler’s legacy of denouncing America’s early forever wars has been largely forgotten. The impact of those conflicts, however, is still with us, as journalist Jonathan M. Katz reveals in Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (St. Martin’s Press). Katz expertly weaves together his insights from his years as a reporter for the Associated Press, often stationed in the same countries that Butler helped to remold to meet the demands of American corporations.

And while Butler foiled whatever the Business Plot may have been (he testified in a special hearing before Congress, spurring a short-lived investigation), the conditions that led to it being plausible seem eerily similar to our present times, a moment when the MyPillow guy is still actively pushing for the overthrow of lawful elections. As in 2022, during the Great Depression, Katz writes, “the divide between outright fascism and the American elite was paper thin.”

Emilio Leanza is associate editor of The Progressive.

Bill Lueders

Two of my favorite books in 2022 draw wisdom from the same deep well: the writer Wendell Berry. One, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (Shoemaker & Company), was written by him, the longest and perhaps boldest of his more than fifty books over the last seven decades. The other, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers (The New Press), by Ruth Conniff, about how dairy farming connects people in the Midwest and Mexico, includes an account, excerpted by The Progressive in its June/July issue, of a visit with Berry at his home in rural Kentucky.

The Need to Be Whole offers an at times audacious perspective of the Civil War and slavery in America, one that rejects seeing these as a pure dichotomy of good versus evil. Berry describes Confederate General Robert E. Lee as “one of the great tragic figures of our history.” He decries slavery while musing that, in practice, it may have been experienced, by those on both sides, as “an everyday human relationship.” He even applies the term “slavery” to the life circumstance of some people today, including “highly paid professionals who cannot escape work they consider demeaning or destructive.”

Berry detests the simplistic generalizations that let Northerners dismiss the South as a haven for bigotry while ignoring their own contributions to the problem. He has long condemned the prejudice against Southern people and agrarianism, which is, in his view, “an ancient, useful, honorable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind.”

Berry has spent a lifetime promoting these values; The Need to Be Whole is his crowning achievement.

Conniff’s Milked tells the stories of people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border who have been “thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control.” We meet workers in the Midwest who send money back to build homes in Mexico. We meet their families, with whom they stay in touch by phone and video chats. The workers pay taxes and make payments to Social Security that they will never collect. The U.S. dairy industry could not operate without them.

“If Mexican workers’ relationship with the United States is a relationship of dependency,” Conniff writes, “[t]he real dependents are U.S. employers, as well as Mexican communities like Texhuacán that survive on migrant labor. Undocumented workers are carrying the economies of both places on their backs.”

Conniff provides a larger critique of the agricultural policies that are wiping out family farms in both the United States and Mexico. As it now stands, she writes, “Dairy farmers in the Midwest have been producing themselves right off the farm” while Mexican workers are trapped on this side of the border, away from their families, “waiting for their real lives to begin.”

Milked points to a way out, through people connecting with each other as human beings, across borders and other divides.

Bill Lueders, former editor and now editor-at-large of The Progressive, is a writer in Madison, Wisconsin.

John Nichols

Who would have thought that a book about the 1939 film Gone with the Wind would do a better job of explaining the contemporary crisis in the United States than anything else published in 2022? But Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, accomplished the task with The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells (Head of Zeus).

Many Americans are aware by now of the awful reality of the post-Civil War era, which saw the Union victors in that contest for the soul of the still-young United States carelessly abandon the work of eradicating systemic racism, as the Confederate losers established the American apartheid of the Jim Crow South. But too few of us recognize the ways that cultural tools—books, theatrical performances, and especially, films—were used to create a grotesquely distorted “memory” of Confederate treason as a noble “lost cause.”

Churchwell explains how the lies were told, decade after decade, generation after generation, through the perfect lens: an examination of the overwhelmingly popular 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, and the film adaptation of that novel three years later by producer David O. Selznick, which is still, after accounting for inflation, the highest grossing film in American history.

By adjusting that lens so that we understand Gone with the Wind’s warped interpretation of slavery and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the post-Civil War South, Churchwell invites readers to recognize how the book and film rewrote history to make enslavers and nightriders into heroes while those who opposed human bondage were portrayed as destructive interlopers who were engaged in “Northern aggression.”

Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, imagined by Mitchell and Selznick as romantic heroes, are revealed as what they always were: unapologetic white supremacists who were willing to destroy lives to defend an old order based on racial and economic injustice. Ashley Wilkes, the “gentleman” of the story, is, in fact, a plantation-owning Klansman.

As she did in her previous book on isolationism and fascism in the pre-World War II United States, Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream,” Churchwell writes about Gone with the Wind as someone who sees the role that popular culture plays in forging dangerous myths. In The Wrath to Come, she admits that, as a child, she quite liked the movie version of Gone with the Wind. But with her remarkable skills as a researcher and writer, Churchwell sets the story straight.

After reading her book, people will see Gone with the Wind differently, with more clarity and understanding. More importantly, Americans will see their history as it really was. Churchwell reminds us that it is only with this clear understanding of the past—freed of the outright lies and self-serving myths of the “lost cause”—that we can forge a United States based on the still unrealized promise of liberty and justice for all.

John Nichols is a contributing writer for The Progressive. He writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times, a daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. Find him on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

Ed Rampell

Over the years, the mainstream media has paid little attention to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, but in Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books), Joshua Frank blows the lid off “the U.S. government’s gargantuan plutonium operation” that “churned out nearly all of the radioactive fuel used in the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

Physicist Enrico Fermi designed the groundbreaking B Reactor for plutonium production at the secretive Hanford site, which played an integral role in the Manhattan Project—the plutonium fuel for the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, at the end of World War II, was produced at Hanford—and in the Cold War, with its anti-communist zeal fueling this atomic hellscape.

Frank, who has a master’s degree in environmental conservation from New York University and is co-editor of CounterPunch, documents various disasters that happened at Hanford over the decades, dubbing the site a “Chernobyl in waiting.” The award-winning journalist makes a compelling case that Hanford has become “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen, and arguably the most contaminated place on the entire planet.” He warns of a potential apocalyptic atomic catastrophe.

Contamination from the radiation engendered by Hanford disproportionately affected Indigenous people, as well as inadequately protected workers at the clandestine installation. Frank notes that Hanford’s costly clean-up “would require, as much, if not more, ingenuity . . . than it took to produce the first atom bomb in the New Mexico desert”—and likely more money. As some turn to nuclear power as a supposed solution to the climate emergency, Atomic Days, published in October 2022, reminds readers of the perils of nuclear waste and its difficult disposal.

Retired homicide detective Harry Bosch is back on the force, now volunteering for the Los Angeles Police Department’s newly constituted Open-Unsolved Unit, commanded by Renée Ballard in Desert Star (Little, Brown), the latest installment of Michael Connelly’s bestselling series. The veteran crime-solver is tasked with cracking cold cases, sending Bosch and Ballard hot on the trail of a serial killer, whose tracks lead right to the L.A. City Council. In doing so, the dedicated detectives encounter flak from LAPD brass and City Hall, reminding them that “politics and police work could never really be separated.”

Connelly puts his expertise as a former newspaper reporter covering the crime beat for the Los Angeles Times and other dailies to good use in his latest page-turner, which includes observations on how current events like the pandemic, the killing of George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter protests affected the LAPD. Bosch’s personal code—“Everybody counts or nobody counts”—propels him across the country on his own dime and time to Key West, Florida, to track down a family killer, Bosch’s “Great White Whale,” who has eluded him for years. From a “copaganda” point of view, Desert Star makes a compelling case: Not all cops are pigs.

Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive. He is the author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, and co-author of three other film history books, including The Hawai‘i Movie and Television Book.

Norman Stockwell

The highlight of my reading year was the arrival of Christopher Neal’s The Rebel Scribe: Carleton Beals and the Progressive Challenge to U.S. Policy in Latin America (Rowman & Littlefield). Neal, who worked as a journalist in Nicaragua during the same years I did, has published a tour de force biography of this little known, but incredibly prolific, twentieth-century journalist.

Carleton Beals wrote more than fifty books during his lifetime (1893–1979) and regularly wrote articles for publications like The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He published at least three dozen pieces in The Progressive between 1945 and 1959. His journalism included covering the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959, and the early years of the Mexican revolutionary government. He was also, notably, the first U.S. journalist to interview Nicaragua’s rebel leader Augusto César Sandino.

Beals reported firsthand on the of Benito Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, and wrote a chronicle of the popular revolts in the South and West of the United States in the 1890s.

This book is an informative history of a singular correspondent, but in the telling of Beals’s story, Neal illuminates many lost or forgotten aspects of the history of the entire twentieth century.

Next September will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the brutal coup d’état in Chile. Much has been written about the coup and its direct aftermath, but in The Investigative Brigade: Hunting Human Rights Criminals in Post-Pinochet Chile (The University of North Carolina Press, translated by Russ Davidson), investigative journalist Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles takes on the unusual task of interviewing the secret police unit that was given the job of unearthing the memories of torture and murder and holding the perpetrators accountable following the 1990 restoration of democracy in that country. “My intention,” Bonnefoy writes in the book’s preface, “is to portray a period in Chile’s recent past illuminated by its complexity and instability, when a model of transitional justice was continually tested and the shadow of military power still loomed.”

Mrill Ingram is a geographer, scientist, and author who has written many pieces for The Progressive and was its web editor from 2015 to 2019. Ingram’s new book, Loving Orphaned Space: The Art and Science of Belonging to Earth (Temple University Press), looks at those places and spaces that are often overlooked or ignored. “My attention on these overlooked and disconnected spaces is,” she writes, “part of a long-term exploration of environmental networks—the relationships connecting people and other beings—and the stories we use to narrate those relationships into existence and maintain them over time.” In 1851, Henry David Thoreau told us, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” More than a century and a half later, Ingram takes this notion to a new level, explaining, “This book is about the orphaning of space and also the work of people who resist the orphaning process . . . . Connections are built and new relationships emerge from their work, which I describe as a kind of radical caring.” This is a book written by, for, and about those who radically care for our world.

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

Dave Zirin

I am supposed to write about my favorite books of 2022 while trying to keep the lump out of my throat following the death of my favorite author, Mike Davis. The journalist, historian, urban geographer, and cultural theorist died in late October at the age of 76.

It is difficult not to feel the full weight of his death and think about what we have lost in terms of toughness, theory, action, and his most awe-inspiring quality: prophecy. Davis resisted being called a prophet, but his analysis led him to speak of the Los Angeles riots before 1992, global pandemics before 2020, and wildfires before they became a haunting annual spectacle and dead-on metaphor for this country.

Folks should read his classic books like City of Quartz, Prisoners of the American Dream, Planet of Slums, and The Monster Enters. He was a straight-up genius, a working-class intellectual, and a fighter of the first order. But another way we can pay tribute to Davis is to celebrate the kinds of histories and analyses that he championed.

Davis stood with those who fought the struggles of the 1960s and joined the battles of oppressed people, particularly those victimized by the state. He viewed movements against racism, led by those affected, as central to building an independent left. I don’t know if in his last months he had read An Enemy Such as This: Larry Casuse and the Fight for Native Liberation in One Family on Two Continents over Three Centuries (Haymarket Books) by David Correia, but it is exactly the kind of historical journalism that Davis championed, particularly in his Los Angeles opus City of Quartz.

This book is, in part, the story of Larry Casuse, a deeply respected Navajo freedom fighter killed at the hands of Gallup, New Mexico, police in March 1973. But the book is not merely about Casuse. It’s also about how the violence of European—and American—settler colonialism feasted upon his family and his people for more than 300 years, and their collective history of resistance.

Correia’s book is also special because in the tradition of Howard Zinn—and Mike Davis—it is a look at settler violence from the perspective of those who were affected and those who fought back. This is not the history, to paraphrase Malcolm X, of Plymouth Rock. It is the story of the people upon whom Plymouth Rock landed.

Davis undoubtedly would have agreed with Casuse’s sentiment in the title, that “never before have we faced an enemy such as this.” But Davis still faced that enemy with courage and snarling contempt, every day. He was the epitome of the words spoken by Eugene Debs, who once said, “The heart of the International Socialist never beats a retreat.”

Dave Zirin writes about sports for The Nation and The Progressive and hosts the Edge of Sports podcast. His most recent book is The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World.