The Progressive's Favorite Books of 2024

Eleanor J. Bader

In the fifty-two years since Title IX of the Education Amendments—an effort to ban sex-based discrimination at colleges and universities that receive federal funding—passed Congress in 1972, sexual violence on campuses has not diminished.

As sociologist Nicole Bedera writes in On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence (University of California Press), this is because college administrators consistently prop up their institutions, fearing that negative publicity about assaults or Title IX violations will lead to fewer applicants and a downturn in donations. But it also rests on the unsubstantiated belief that sexual violence on campus is uncommon. Moreover, an ingrained belief that staff members need to ensure that male perpetrators are not falsely accused has had a deleterious impact on women who have sought justice.

The upshot, Bedera writes, is that schools favor “symbolic measures” like handing out whistles at orientation rather than establishing clear protocols for removing predators from classrooms, dorms, and the campus quad. Furthermore, survivors typically feel unsupported by policies that obfuscate how complaints are filed and investigated. They are also often frustrated by complex rules that limit their ability to move from one residence hall to another, speak about their assault publicly, or request classroom accommodations.

Overt sexism is also apparent, with victim blaming continuing to cast the victims as somehow complicit in their abuse. Unsurprisingly, Bedera writes that pervasive misogyny adds to the survivors’ trauma. After filing a complaint, “their mental and physical health deteriorated. Their support systems faltered. The threats to their safety intensified. Their options for future recourse narrowed.”

It’s a grim finding bolstered by Bedera’s year-long research at an unnamed public university.

Enraging and powerful, On the Wrong Side makes numerous recommendations and offers a searing indictment of Title IX’s failures. “Campus sexual violence is a persistent social problem,” she concludes, “but not because it’s impossible to solve.” We must do better.

Bill Blum

American democracy is facing an existential crisis. The public has lost faith in our governmental institutions, and the nation, still reeling from the January 6 insurrection, the pandemic, and the rise and re-election of Donald Trump, has been cleaved into warring camps divided along geographic, racial, class, and ideological lines.

That much is obvious. What is less clear is why American democracy has faltered. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, argues in his latest book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (Liveright), that the crisis stems in good measure from structural defects in the Constitution itself.

The fifty-five white men of property who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 and drafted the Constitution produced a document that embodied a host of “Faustian bargains” and compromises that were necessary to secure the document’s ratification, but were at their core antidemocratic. Among the defects Chemerinsky explores are the Electoral College, which the Founding Fathers adopted rather than allowing the President to be elected by popular vote; the design of the Senate, which accords each state two members regardless of population; and the protection of slavery and states’ rights, which has produced a shameful legacy of racial inequality.

Even if the Constitution may have fit the needs of a thinly populated agrarian society in the late eighteenth century, it no longer works for a culturally diverse and vibrant modern one. And as time goes on, Chemerinsky contends, the crisis will only deepen.

Given the procedural difficulties of amending the Constitution, Chemerinsky writes that the time may have come for a new Constitutional convention and the drafting of a new national charter. It’s either that, he suggests, or a slow slide into a latter-day form of secession, which could be peaceful, but would nonetheless end with a formal separation of red and blue states.

No Democracy Lasts Forever is a deeply pessimistic work but well worth a careful read.

David Boddiger

I’ve always found photojournalism to be the most personally impactful medium to study and absorb the brutalities of war, which is one of the worst manifestations of human behavior. The symphony of silence summoned by a moment frozen in time prompts the requisite reflection upon matters of such great horror—and of subsequent resilience and immortal hope.

I recently acquired a signed copy of photojournalist Byron Smith’s award-winning debut monograph, Testament ’22: A Visual Road Diary Through a War Zone (Verlag Kettler), documenting the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I mention that it is signed because after viewing Smith’s black-and-white and color photo spread and reflecting on his 10,000-mile journey through a war zone to obtain it, the signature stands out as an exclamation point to his personal sacrifice, risk, and devotion to telling a story that should not be forgotten. While the social media fervor that exploded in 2022 in support of Ukraine during the first few months of the war has since subsided, Smith’s photography ensures that the suffering and perseverance of the Ukrainian people will be permanently recorded.

This seven-by-ten-inch book of 192 pages is the size of an artist’s sketchbook or a writer’s journal—a road diary—something I imagine Smith, who has previously published photo essays in the pages of The Progressive, might have carried with him on his precarious peregrination. The book was inspired by the beloved Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, author of Kobzar, a collection of poems that has helped shape modern Ukrainian language and national aspirations. It also contains an essay by reporter Igor Kossov, paintings by Victor Onyshchenko, and illustrations by Karolina Gulshani.

I was already deeply moved by these dramatic images—the bombed-out buildings, the terrified refugees seeking safety, the ironic graffiti by Russian invaders screaming “Death to Fascists!”—but after November 5, 2024, I looked at them again, knowing that my people had turned their backs on innocent Ukrainian souls simply fighting for an opportunity to live in peace and prosper. I will never look at a field of sunflowers in the same way again.

Michaela Brant

“Forget everything you’ve been taught to believe about America’s suburbs, land of quarter-acre lots, cul-de-sacs, and two-car garages,” Mike Hixenbaugh writes in the opening lines of They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms (Mariner Books). “[The suburbs] of 2024 are now more diverse than the nation overall—and just as bitterly divided.”

The award-winning investigative journalist at NBC News dove deep into the community of Southlake, Texas, to report on the politicization and rightwing takeover of a local public school board. Interviewing parents, teachers, students, and other community members, They Came for the Schools outlines how Southlake’s attempt to address racism and discrimination against its students got sidelined by powerful and connected ultraconservatives bent on getting Christianity back into public schools. Hixenbaugh positions this case as a blueprint for other school board wars in Texas, and in U.S. suburbs across the nation, as well as an important part of the right’s demonization of “critical race theory” and “woke gender ideology” (meaning the acknowledgment of racism and the existence of LGBTQ+ people).

The book weaves together book bans, school board elections, local and national politics, and the history of the Christian right to illuminate the problem at hand and offer an example of how to fight back. At times infuriating and overall anxiety-inducing, They Came for the Schools is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of public education in the United States.

Ruth Conniff

My friend David Greenberg has written a beautiful and engaging biography of John Lewis, the late civil rights hero and U.S. Representative from Georgia. I must admit that when I received my review copy of John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster), at a daunting 704 pages, it sat on the table for weeks. Then my daughter, home from college, picked it up and couldn’t stop reading it. I had to order another copy when she took it back to school. As soon as I began the dramatic story of Lewis’s life, I was hooked. The fight for voting rights is far from over. This book is a reminder of how far we’ve come and how much we have to lose.

War (Simon & Schuster) by Bob Woodward is full of previously unreported tidbits showcasing the depths of Donald Trump’s derelictions. Most of all, it is a harrowing portrait of the scramble by the Biden Administration to stave off World War III. Read it and realize how fragile and complicated the task of promoting peace really is.

A Creek Runs Through This Driftless Land: A Farm Family’s Journey Toward a Land Ethic (Little Creek Press) by Richard L. Cates Jr. is a beautiful portrait of a Wisconsin farm family and their journey, as Cates puts it, to discover a “land ethic.” The book is a balm—a pleasure to read, grounding, and hopeful. I highly recommend it.

Jules Gibbs

I want to recommend two books this year; both are by fantastic poets, but not entirely composed of poetry.

A new book of essays, poems, and collages by polymath, littérateur, and contributor to The Progressive Linda Norton, Cloud of Witnesses (BlazeVOX), was assembled during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. It is a brilliant one-woman show—fortified by books from the Oakland Public Library and her re-encounter with her own books and margin notes. It is the act of a bright mind ranging, breaking, careening, and juxtaposing disparate voices from the time of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. She makes “herself available to what walks up,” like Joni Mitchell at the Newport Jazz Festival. She is a supreme witness of our historical, cultural moment, and of rage and love and enduring.

“I love the stunt for how it opens the gates to dreaming, and I love anything that pushes against the door of reality and offers an elsewhere,” says poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib in his new book of essays, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House). Abdurraqib comes from Columbus, Ohio, and witnessed in the 1990s the legend of LeBron James. Basketball is his vehicle, but the tenor is the politics of inheritance, Blackness, homecoming, shit talking (“shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own”), and Ohio cities. He is a most committed disciple of a sport that is both romance and hustle, “the mercy of exits” and “the city of the true self.” His language is a jukebox and a collection plate at church, a blast of articulation and mercy.

Brian Gilmore

Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson published two important books this year. Both are about right now, but also, about the future.

Pappé, the preeminent Israeli historian of Palestinian studies in the world today, presents Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic (Oneworld Publications), an epic narrative of Israel’s historic rise, and its powerful lobbying efforts in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s book, Lovely One (Random House), is a memoir from a Justice who could shape the future Supreme Court deep into the twenty-first century, when the United States will be a different country—if it survives intact.

Lobbying for Zionism is a road map tale of a persecuted people who seized an opportunity to change their position in the world by building alliances and contacts within the world’s two twentieth-century imperial powers. While Pappé’s book does not speak kindly of the settler colonial society that he left long ago, his scholarship is impeccable. The reader will learn things about the rise of Israel never heard before, and it is likely that minds will be changed on the subject. It is also likely that Americans will grow angrier about the role played by the United States in the ongoing occupation and enduring siege of the Palestinian people.

Jackson’s Lovely One is also a story of great detail. Her story is simple: It is a book about family, and how that family helped her become the first African American woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her ancestors, grandparents, parents, and then her own family—her surgeon husband, Patrick, and their two daughters—are the stars of this story.

Yes, Jackson is a high-achieving, intellectual prodigy who does not come across as an improbable actor in American history, but she is also a study in love and humility. This book could have been overly focused on her, but it isn’t. It is an originalist biography; Jackson knows what brought her to this moment in history, and she wanted to pay homage to it.

Kim Kelly

Every nonfiction author hopes their work will be viewed as prescient, important, and ideally, timely; thus the rush to hit certain publishing deadlines and the inevitable glut of political books that flood the market every election season.

When Culture Warlords author Talia Lavin began writing her second book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America (Legacy Lit), she knew it would still be relevant three years later, but not how relevant. That would come as an unwelcome surprise, after the Christian nationalist movement she interrogates within its pages would help to propel its favored candidate, Donald Trump, to a surprise win in the 2024 presidential election.

Wild Faith is an ambitious and often deeply unsettling book that gives readers an intimate glimpse inside the extreme strain of authoritarian Christianity that continues to shape the United States. Lavin spent years researching its narrow and vengeful world, drawing upon her own experience as a chronicler of the far right to outline the political contours of the movement in her trademark hyperliterate prose. She also collected testimonies from more than 100 former evangelicals who shared their stories of fear, repression, and abuse at the hands of the theocratic extremists in their homes and churches.

Lavin, who was raised in the Orthodox Jewish faith, approaches the subject matter with great sensitivity, giving survivors room to grieve while highlighting the nuances of the Christian right’s brutal political project, from book bans and tradwives to the horrifying prevalence of child abuse. It’s unfortunate that those dangers are now so very immediate, but with Wild Faith, Lavin provides much-needed context for those who hope to understand—and survive—the coming storm.

Bill Lueders

About a mile from my house in Madison, Wisconsin, is Warner Park, a not-so-little patch of land that combines human amenities such as ball fields and playgrounds with green space teeming with living things, including foxes, coyotes, bald eagles, and sandhill cranes. A black-and-white photograph of one of its majestic trees once graced the bedroom wall of the lead character in the TV show Grey’s Anatomy.

Trish O’Kane’s Birding to Change the World: A Memoir (Ecco) similarly puts Warner Park into the national spotlight in all of its beauty and transformative power. A former investigative reporter in Latin America, O’Kane was about to start a teaching job in New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina wiped out the home she had just moved into. In the stillness following that devastation, she discovered the world of birds chirping all around her. It changed her life; she describes it as a liberation.

O’Kane moved to Madison to earn a doctorate in environmental studies and lived for several years in a house across the street from Warner Park. She helped found Wild Warner, a local activist group that successfully opposed plans to make the park more amenable to humans, essentially by turning grass into concrete. She also launched a program that paired neighborhood kids with college students to explore the park’s wonders. She and others who became the park’s protectors “noticed things most of us never see—the tiny things that hold the planet together.”

Now a lecturer in environmental justice at the University of Vermont, O’Kane is a gifted writer and an indelible presence. Birding to Change the World is about the essential relationships between people and nature, activism and introspection, learning and knowledge.

This is a book you’ll be excited to share with friends, including the ones with feathers.

Alfred Meyer

While the $1.7 trillion effort to totally rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons complex spurs on the new nuclear arms race with Russia and China, and at the same time, the United States and twenty-one other countries have pledged to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050, this is a particularly appropriate time to seriously consider both the public and individual health impacts of the many complex parts of the nuclear enterprise. Do we have thorough and accurate information about this existential issue?

The Scientists Who Alerted Us to the Dangers of Radiation (Ethics Press) by Ian Fairlie and Cindy Folkers is an eminently readable and rigorously researched book that illustrates how, from the beginning of the nuclear age almost 100 years ago, scientists who questioned the public health and safety of the nuclear enterprise have been systematically attacked and silenced.

Twenty-four individuals comprise the book’s Honor Roll of Radiation Scientists, with fourteen Honorable Mentions, each biography noting their place in the scientific history of health concerns from exposure to ionizing radiation. Some, like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Linus Pauling, are famous. Most are more publicly obscure while doing very important work, often making groundbreaking scientific discoveries working in prominent academic and governmental positions.

Until, that is, their work led to conclusions that raised questions about the safety and public health impact of the nuclear enterprise. When that happened, the various scientists lost funding, academic and governmental positions, membership in professional societies, and professional reputations, sometimes being vehemently attacked. Yet time and again, further science usually proves these early warnings to have been true.

The authors find hope in such things as the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and in bioindicator research techniques that allow for radiation dosage to be measured rather than calculated, thus allowing for a more precise understanding of cause and effect. Can we find the political will to understand and address the increasing cumulative population dose that threatens our species’ genomic stability?

Delaney Nelson

In social media posts announcing the release of Forest of Noise: Poems (Knopf), Palestinian poet and scholar Mosab Abu Toha wrote to his followers, “When you open the book, the poems shall scream, the words like shrapnel, bomb, and F-16 shall cut the branches and trunks of centuries-old trees. The roots shall bury their eyes and you shall witness the true scene of what this planet looks like, should you look truly, as long as these poems happen again and again and again.”

Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise is a testimony of survival under Israeli occupation and an ode to his homeland. After earning a master’s degree from Syracuse University in 2023, Abu Toha returned to his family in Gaza to complete his second book. The ongoing military bombardment destroyed Abu Toha’s home and the personal library he had built for his community. He fled Gaza with his family in November 2023.

In fewer than 100 pages, Abu Toha invites readers into life under occupation. He transports us to his grandfather’s orange groves in Yaffa; to his family’s home as they shelter from an Israeli air strike; to his community library that is destroyed by Israel’s bombs; to his detainment by the Israeli military while trying to evacuate Gaza; and to the Jabalia refugee camp where his mother is staying. We meet his young family as they flee violence, a young girl whose body is dismembered and unrecognizable under the rubble, and a Gazan mother shielding her children from an airstrike.

In the epigraph, Abu Toha employs the wise words of Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury.” Forest of Noise takes this axiom literally: Amid the destruction of his homeland, Abu Toha generously and urgently shares with the reader his dreams, his fears, and the reality of survival—with an ever-present clarity about how grim and beautiful it is to be Palestinian.

Two of the poems that appear in Forest of Noise were first published by The Progressive in October 2023.

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Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, more than fourteen million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. At least five million have fled the country, seeking refuge, and a large portion of all refugees globally are from Syria.

In The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright), historian and political scientist Wendy Pearlman delves into the result of the Syrian conflict: the world’s largest refugee crisis and the resulting challenges for policy, culture, and humanity. As Pearlman writes, “The impact of war lies not only in scorched earth and casualty counts, but also in how violence transforms the people who endure it, with ripple effects that alter entire societies.”

The Home I Worked to Make explores what it means to define and make home among the Syrian diaspora and attempts to make sense of the Syrian civil war and its inextricably linked revolution, loss, and displacement. The book draws on hundreds of interviews with Syrian refugees facing the realities of leaving home, losing home, searching for home, and building home.

“Refugees do not have the luxury of being unreflective about home,” Pearlman writes, adding later, “What is home and what is exile when the place of one’s birth represents not only ‘the nourishment of tradition,’ in [Edward] Said’s words, but also degradation and violence?”

While the book is structured by Pearlman, who provides helpful context and analysis throughout the text, displaced and exiled Syrians tell its story. Pearlman relies on their insights to answer, or even just bear witness to, the complex questions of home. The Home I Worked to Make challenges prevalent harmful stereotypes of immigrants and displaced people and centers the humanity and diverse experiences of the Syrian diaspora.

This book challenges the idea of home as a place, repositioning it as a struggle, achievement, and feeling. As Pearlman writes, “Home is thus multifaceted and multidimensional. If a single word embodies its opposite, however, it might be ‘exile.’ ”

Ed Rampell

Censorship is a hot button issue today. In The Naughty Bits: What the Censors Wouldn’t Let You See in Hollywood’s Most Famous Movies (Sticking Place Books), film historian Nat Segaloff investigates Hollywood’s infamous Motion Picture Production Code. The film industry policed itself from 1934 to 1968 so that government, churches, and other pressure groups wouldn’t. The Hays Office, named after Will H. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America from 1922 to 1945, prescreened scripts before production to enforce Tinseltown’s taboos. The infamous Hays Code prohibited “profanity,” “miscegenation,” “sex perversion” (i.e., LGBTQ+ issues), “sedition,” and more.

Meticulously researching Code archives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ library, Segaloff unearths endless examples of how it “restricted artistic expression and suppressed progressive thought.” Hays hitman Joseph Breen cautioned Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer about “difficulties” in producing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because it “portray[s] the U.S. Senate as . . . politicians who, if not deliberately crooked, are completely controlled by lobbyists for special interests.” In 1939, Frank Capra directed Mr. Smith for another studio, Columbia Pictures.

Regarding Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, Breen urged “several references to ‘Moscow’ and to the alleged ‘Red Menace’ not be made to appear as a dishonest or ‘trumped up’ charge . . . to get away from . . . [the] suggestion that the police and . . . officials are . . . shouting about a ‘Red Menace’ when there is no valid reason.”

About John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, Breen advised Jack Warner that Sam Spade’s speech about district attorneys “should be rewritten to get away from characterizing most [district attorneys] as men who will do anything to further their careers.”

Sex was another big bugaboo, so the homophobe Breen also warned against characterizing Joel Cairo as a “pansy as indicated by the lavender perfume” in The Maltese Falcon. For 1935’s Mutiny on the Bounty, Breen fumed about Clark Gable and Mamo Clark “lying on the ground embracing . . . [as] horizontal lovemaking has always proved questionable.”

Gable also famously clashed with bluenoses over saying “damn” in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, while nitpickers demanded “hell” be removed from the screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men that same year. The restrictive Code even forbade uttering “lousy.” With bleepers breathing down filmmakers’ necks, it’s a miracle any movies survived their censorial scissors.

In The Naughty Bits, Segaloff puts into historical context the challenges still facing free speech ninety years after the Code was let loose.

Norman Stockwell

In a time when growing numbers of people get their news and entertainment from platforms like Facebook and TikTok, it is common to see declarations that “radio is dead.” But in December 2000, the Federal Communications Commission launched a new low power FM radio service (LPFM), and individuals and groups across the country jumped on board, creating a new form of community tailored to the needs of local populations. Some 2,000 LPFM stations now exist throughout the United States—some of which I helped build in those early years.

One of the people inspired by this new opportunity was Sharon Scott of Louisville, Kentucky, who co-founded the station WXOX (also known as ARTxFM). Now one of the key organizers of the annual Grassroots Radio Conference, Scott has authored a new book in the popular “for dummies” series to help others get their start. Low Power FM for Dummies (John Wiley & Sons) gives step-by-step information to anyone wanting to build an organization and a station.

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Orin Langelle has been documenting social justice movements for more than half a century. In addition to illustrating a report I did from Nairobi, Kenya, in 2007, his photographs have appeared in the pages of The Progressive and other publications, and in multiple galleries and activist spaces.

In 2003, he co-founded the Global Justice Ecology Project, through which he has produced a new book of his photographs called Portraits of Struggle. It documents his work around the globe from 1972 to the present day. Chronicling movements for change—some successful, some repressed—Langelle’s pictures are inspiring and affirming of the power of peoples’ movements.

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Allen Levie, a high school teacher for nearly two decades in Racine, Wisconsin, knows his stuff when it comes to writing about teaching. His new independently published book, Thriving in a Public School (Austin Design Lab), gives an insider’s view of building a social justice curriculum and empowering students to become involved in their community and their school.

By engaging the students in working to make a better world, Levie also helped them to become better students in school and better at navigating the racial and economic obstacles to success that our society has put in their path.

The book includes interviews with fifty former students, all of whom relate the transformational power of learning to see the world through a lens of social justice. The book also includes an epilogue that tells how, even after Levie’s retirement in 2019, the students continued their organizing work—around COVID-19 and helping to assure the safety of essential workers, around the 2020 elections, and around issues in the governance of their school.

“It has become part of the DNA of the school. Many of the new freshmen already know about the activist organizing efforts and have signed up to be part of it,” Levie writes of the incoming class in 2023.