A Year in Reading: Ed Yong

In a year of bleak and shocking world events, my bookshelf has been similarly characterized by heartbreak, subversion, and sometimes both.

In Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng uses familiar thriller elements — a normal family rocked by tragedy! — as the backbone for a singular and exceptional story about how every generation is oppressed by the restrictions of the current one and the pressures of the last. In War of the Whales, Joshua Horwitz reveals how military sonar has repeatedly and fatally driven whales onto beaches. It’s a dark and unfamiliar twist on the familiar “save the whales” conservation trope, told through a rich and precise narrative; a sequence midway through, from a whale’s perspective, remains the most moving passage I’ve read this year. In A Burglar’s Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh takes the most mundane aspects of architecture — walls, ceilings, fire escapes — and imbues them with a wondrous new quality by showing them through the eyes of burglars, the “idiot masters of the built environment, drunk Jedis of architectural space.”

And in White Rage, Carol Anderson describes the history of black rights in America, from the end of the Civil War to the finale of the administration of Barack Obama, showing how every advancement has been met by an insidious rollback, not from obvious quarters like the Klan, but from bureaucrats and legislators. “With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.” It’s shocking, beautifully written, and, with white supremacy knocking on the White House door, more important than ever. Some books are great, some books are essential. White Rage is the latter.

More from A Year in Reading 2016

Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now.

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

The post A Year in Reading: Ed Yong appeared first on The Millions.

from The Millions http://ift.tt/2gyztuV

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 . In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog