social science

Thanks to everyone who braved the snarled traffic this morning to make the RA Roundtable meeting AND to the fine folks at Central Birmingham Public Library’s Southern History Department for hosting!

For those interested in rare books, documents, maps, and manuscripts, mark this Sunday, December 15th at 3pm on your calendar.  There will be a guest lecturer in BPL’s auditorium to talk about one of the Rare Book Room’s most prized possessions, the royal first edition of the Atlas Maior published by Johann Blaeu in 1662.

During our most recent meeting, the topic was all things social science.  I brought 2 handouts featuring Lit Hub and Publishers Weekly’s top 2019 social science books.  Those titles will be featured at the bottom of the post after our participants’ selections.

Don’t forget to register for the ALLA Public Library Division midwinter conference taking place on Friday, January 31, 2020 at the Homewood Library.  Register at https://bit.ly/2RFnuwJ.

The next Reader’s Advisory Roundtable meeting will be February 12, 2020 at the Homewood Library and the topic up for discussion is urban fiction. 

In attendance today:

Holley, Emmet O’Neal Library
Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History
Jon, Avondale
Lynn, Central BPL
Michelle, Irondale
Maura, Trussville

The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good by Elizabeth Cline

(amazon) From journalist, fashionista, and clothing resale expert Elizabeth L. Cline, “the Michael Pollan of fashion,”* comes the definitive guide to building an ethical, sustainable wardrobe you'll love.

Clothing is one of the most personal expressions of who we are. In her landmark investigation Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline first revealed fast fashion’s hidden toll on the environment, garment workers, and even our own satisfaction with our clothes. The Conscious Closet shows exactly what we can do about it.

Whether your goal is to build an effortless capsule wardrobe, keep up with trends without harming the environment, buy better quality, seek out ethical brands, or all of the above, The Conscious Closet is packed with the vital tools you need. Elizabeth delves into fresh research on fashion’s impacts and shows how we can leverage our everyday fashion choices to change the world through style. Inspired by her own revelatory journey getting off the fast-fashion treadmill, Elizabeth shares exactly how to build a more ethical wardrobe, starting with a mindful closet clean-out and donating, swapping, or selling the clothes you don't love to make way for the closet of your dreams.

The Conscious Closet is not just a style guide. It is a call to action to transform one of the most polluting industries on earth—fashion—into a force for good. Readers will learn where our clothes are made and how they’re made, before connecting to a global and impassioned community of stylish fashion revolutionaries. In The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth shows us how we can start to truly love and understand our clothes again—without sacrificing the environment, our morals, or our style in the process.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

Opium: How an Ancient Flower Shaped and Poisoned Our World by John Halpern

(amazon) From a psychiatrist on the frontlines of addiction medicine and an expert on the history of drug use, comes the "authoritative, engaging, and accessible" (Booklist) history of the flower that helped to build -- and now threatens -- modern society.

Opioid addiction is fast becoming the most deadly crisis in American history. In 2018, it claimed nearly fifty thousand lives -- more than gunshots and car crashes combined, and almost as many Americans as were killed in the entire Vietnam War. But even as the overdose crisis ravages our nation -- straining our prison system, dividing families, and defying virtually every legislative solution to treat it -- few understand how it came to be.

Opium tells the "fascinating" (Lit Hub) and at times harrowing tale of how we arrived at today's crisis, "mak[ing] timely and startling connections among painkillers, politics, finance, and society" (Laurence Bergreen). The story begins with the discovery of poppy artifacts in ancient Mesopotamia, and goes on to explore how Greek physicians and obscure chemists discovered opium's effects and refined its power, how colonial empires marketed it around the world, and eventually how international drug companies developed a range of powerful synthetic opioids that led to an epidemic of addiction.

Throughout, Dr. John Halpern and David Blistein reveal the fascinating role that opium has played in building our modern world, from trade networks to medical protocols to drug enforcement policies. Most importantly, they disentangle how crucial misjudgments, patterns of greed, and racial stereotypes served to transform one of nature's most effective painkillers into a source of unspeakable pain -- and how, using the insights of history, state-of-the-art science, and a compassionate approach to the illness of addiction, we can overcome today's overdose epidemic.

This urgent and masterfully woven narrative tells an epic story of how one beautiful flower became the fascination of leaders, tycoons, and nations through the centuries and in their hands exposed the fragility of our civilization.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

One for a Man, Two for a Horse: A Pictorial History, Grave and Comic, of Patent Medicines by Gerald Carson

(from the book jacket) Recalling in words and pictures the fads, follies and foibles of self-doctoring in grandpa's day. Hundreds of rare, old pictures, posters, photographs, almanacs and advertisements.

Mary Anne, Central BPL Southern History

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Patients, Her Therapist, and Life's Essential Questions by Lori Gottlieb

(amazon) One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is rev­olutionary in its candor, offering a deeply per­sonal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly reveal­ing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.

Michelle, Irondale

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre

(amazon) The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Zurich, Cape Town, Melbourne, and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in shadowy political consultancies and on social networks.

Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon. Along the way it examines nothing less than the definition of the self--our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you, you?

Michelle, Irondale

Alabama Rivers: A Celebration & Challenge by William Deutsch

(alabamariversbook.org) This book invites you to travel down rivers and through time to encounter the rich human history and natural wonders that have defined Alabama. Along the way, you will celebrate an array of magnificent rivers filled with unique plants and animals, shaped over the ages by a remarkably diverse geology. You will appreciate how rivers have served people from the first Paleo-Indian settlements to the present. Accept the challenge to restore and protect our rivers for their economic, cultural, and ecological benefits, but most of all because it is the right thing to do.

Jon, Avondale

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

(amazon) As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River.

McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler’s son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough’s subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them.

Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.

Jon, Avondale

The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz

(amazon) Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues, and neither does any other era from our cultural past. This revised edition includes a new introduction and epilogue, exploring how the clash between growing gender equality and rising economic inequality is reshaping family life, marriage, and male-female relationships in our modern era.

More relevant than ever, The Way We Never Were is a potent corrective to dangerous nostalgia for an American tradition that never really existed.

Holley, Emmet O’Neal

Before and After: The Incredible Real-Life Stories of Orphans Who Survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate

(amazon) From the 1920s to 1950, Georgia Tann ran a black-market baby business at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. She offered up more than 5,000 orphans tailored to the wish lists of eager parents—hiding the fact that many weren’t orphans at all, but stolen sons and daughters of poor families, desperate single mothers, and women told in maternity wards that their babies had died.

The publication of Lisa Wingate’s novel Before We Were Yours brought new awareness of Tann’s lucrative career in child trafficking. Adoptees who knew little about their pasts gained insight into the startling facts behind their family histories. Encouraged by their contact with Wingate and award-winning journalist Judy Christie, who documented the stories of fifteen adoptees in this book, many determined Tann survivors set out to trace their roots and find their birth families.

Before and After includes moving and sometimes shocking accounts of the ways in which adoptees were separated from their first families. Often raised as only children, many have joyfully reunited with siblings in the final decades of their lives. Christie and Wingate tell of first meetings that are all the sweeter and more intense for time missed and of families from very different social backgrounds reaching out to embrace better-late-than-never brothers, sisters, and cousins. In a poignant culmination of art meeting life, many of the long-silent victims of the tragically corrupt system return to Memphis with the authors to reclaim their stories at a Tennessee Children’s Home Society reunion . . . with extraordinary results.

Lynn, Central BPL

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

(amazon) FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal.

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well.

Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear--and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence--the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Maura, Trussville

HANDOUTS FROM THE MEETING

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOKS 2019

Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration by Emily Bazelon

Combining personal narratives with legal and political history, Bazelon writes a necessary overview of America’s criminal justice system and the unchecked power of prosecutors.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

In this engaging read, Cullen tells the stories of the students who attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and launched March for Our Lives. A human portrayal of the ongoing toll of school shootings and the demand for change.

A Good Provider is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century by Jason DeParle

DeParle puts a human touch on international migration by profiling three generations f a Manila family, as his subjects work in hospitals, hotels, and cruise ships, in search of stable wages. An unforgettable story of sacrifice and separation.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

In this hard-hitting expose, Farrow sheds light on systems of power and abuse, and how both have shaped our current media and political landscape where people on the margins are often ignored or silenced.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe turns a dark subject into a riveting page-turner, blending threads of espionage, murder mystery, and political history as he tells the story of the conflict known as the Troubles.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

National Book Award winner Kendi uses his own journey as a focal point for self-examination, exploring not only the history of racism and racist ideas past and present, but also how we can challenge ourselves to develop a more equitable society.

Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard

Leonard writes an extensive, far-reaching history of the privately-owned Koch Industries, including how the company has influenced environmental and public policy, often through deceitful and dishonest practices.

Beneath the Tamarind Tree: A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram by Isha Sesay

The powerful work movingly relays how the kidnapping of 276 girls from Chibok, Nigeria, in 2014 continues to impact families who have yet to be reunited.

No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder

With this searing investigation into domestic violence in America, Snyder uses personal recollections in order to show how families cope when they lose someone to intimate partner violence, and the lasting effects on children.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present by David Treuer

Blending history, reporting, and memoir, Ojibwe historian Treuer creates a sweeping account of Native North America, before and after Wounded Knee, showing how tribes persevered despite oppression and persecution.

LIT HUB’S FALL 2019 NONFICTION PREVIEW: SOCIAL SCIENCE

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West

With her signature mix of incisive wit and sharp culture criticism, West’s new book promises to untangle the systems of power that have allowed American culture to disempower women and people of color while propping up misogyny, racism, and other forces that propelled our current president to the White House.

White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation by Lauren Michele Jackson

Lauren Michele Jackson is one of those critics who has her eyes on everything from digital jukeboxes and memes to contemporary pop music and black aesthetics. In her book debut, a mélange of scholarly critique and narrative prose, Jackson takes on cultural appropriation. Her argument isn’t simply that a white woman wearing cornrows is poor form, to use one example; the issue is the way in which mainstream visibility is inextricably joined with racial inequality, in this case white profit at the expense of black cultural gatekeepers.

For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity by Liz Plank

Liz Plank looks for alternative ways to be a man in a society that is paying new attention to abuses perpetuated by men, but still punishes those who fail to live up to a “traditional” version of masculinity. In our recent history, she writes, “We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn’t update what it means to be a man.” This book offers a one kind of blueprint for how to do exactly that.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

We haven’t seen a book from Gladwell since 2013’s David and Goliath. Gladwell’s eclectic, pop psychological approach aims for new heights as he turns his attention to strangers: How can we bridge the gap between ourselves and people we don’t know? It’s the question that is perhaps at the root of the present partisan alienation felt keenly in the US, and Gladwell proposes answers in case studies: Sandra Bland, Bernie Madoff, Sylvia Plath, Amanda Knox, and more—people who most of us will only ever know based on the stories other people have told about them.

Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today by Curtis White

The idea of “counterculture” doesn’t need to be confined to the social movements of the 60s and 70s, Curtis White argues in this book, which calls for a revitalized counterculture—one that actually challenges who is in power today.

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein brought down an empire of abuse and brought forth a worldwide chorus of voices calling for those in power to believe women. With She Said, the tell the story of how that reporting reached the public, and the process that followed, as their initial reporting spurred dozens of other investigations of violence, sexual harassment, and abuses of power.

Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State by Nick Neely

Two-hundred -and-fifty years ago, a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portola traveled along the coast of what is now California. Walking 650 miles on foot, Nick Neely retraces those steps over the course of 12 weeks, along the way discussing the history of indigenous cultures, colonization, and industry that formed California’s identity.

The Queering of Corporate America: How Big Business Went from LGBTQ Adversary to Ally by Carlos A. Ball

The role of corporate conglomerates in queer culture has long been a point of controversy, from the overt—including companies who advertise rainbow logos while donating to anti-LGBTQ politicians—to more complex conversations about who actually benefits and who is harmed when capitalist logic and corporate power come to bear on the LGBTQ community. Carlos A. Ball argues in favor of using that power for social reform (to the extent such a thing is possible), and in the process looks at the history that brought us here.

The Season: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson

From England to the American South, Kristen Richardson follows the long history of a bizarre social custom as an efficient way to present young women for marriage. Her experience with the topic is personal—after refusing to take part in her own debutante ball, she began researching their history. “I had been taught these dances since I was in the fifth grade, and clearly this event was meant to be some sort of culmination of that training,” she wrote for Rookie. “But I still didn’t understand why we were there, or what this ritual was about.” Her book promises some answers to that.

Beyond Aesthetics: Use, Abuse, and Dissonance in African Art Traditions by Wole Soyinka

At times anecdotal, describing encounters with muses and deities, and at times political and theoretical, Beyond Aesthetics steps behind the curtain of art collection. In exploring these like that of identity, tradition, and originality, Soyinka reveals how curators and collectors alike hold the power to aleter or even suppress Africa’s artistic traditions. A propoenent of collecting as a meqans of reclaiming tradition, Soyinka makes a passionate case for understanding and ingaging with Africa’s rich cultural history.