Joe Hayden – Memphis Flyer

We’re normally treated to best-of lists during the holidays, or when most people are otherwise distracted from reading and deterred from contemplation. But quarantining and social-distancing provide the perfect setting to catch up on those must-reads. Here, then, is one journalism professor’s list of the best non-fiction books of the last 10 years. Many carry a strong social-justice message. All are powerful, page-turning narratives.

1. (2010) Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
Based on sources in nearly a dozen different languages, this jolting account of the murderous policies that decimated eastern Europe will broaden the way you think about World War II.

2. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky
A definitive rebuttal to the Internet-is-bad crowd, Shirky makes a persuasive defense of the many virtues of social media.

3. (2010) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddartha Mukherjee
Humanity’s long struggle to identify, treat, and vanquish cancer is told in this riveting medical history that is, at turns, scientific and philosophical alike. [Pulitzer Prize winner]

4. (2010) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
A snapshot in the history of cancer turns out to be a singular part of the scientific quest to understand and defeat it. But Skloot’s most powerful contribution is introducing readers to the unforgettable Lacks family.

5. (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Alexander wasn’t the first person to explain the systematic exploitation of Black people in the post-civil rights era, but her influential book more than any other put the prison-industrial complex on trial and probably contributed the intellectual underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter movement.

6. (2011) The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
A book so beautiful, so lyrical even, that you will feel as though you’ve come to terms with something significant about American history, shared in the experience, and learned from it.

7. (2012) Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History by George Howe Colt
Equal parts memoir and history, this book tells fascinating stories about such families as the Booths, Kelloggs, van Goghs, and Marxes, often in ways that richly illuminate the more famous siblings.

8. (2012) Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen
Maybe the best memoir in the last decade, Iversen’s arresting look at life in the shadow of a toxic waste site exposes the environmental predation rampant in our society.

9. (2012) The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Stiglitz catalogs the many policy choices in America that keep rich people rich and poor people poor.

10. (2013) Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
Piketty’s sweeping study of inequality shows that capitalism’s defects are both structural and political and thus inherently undemocratic unless checked.

11. (2013) Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
The terrifying suspense in this book hearkens the film Chernobyl as it details how catastrophically a number of secret mishaps could have gone, including the accidental explosion in 1980 of a nuclear missile in central Arkansas. [Pulitzer Prize finalist]

12. (2014) In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
The harrowing story of the USS Jeannette’s ill-fated 1879 voyage to explore the Arctic Ocean and reach the North Pole.

13. (2014) Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
One of the smartest critics of the last quarter-century, the late Christopher Hitchens suffered no fools, even when he was diagnosed with cancer. His reflections on life and politics are characteristically fearless.

14. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
The planet changes every day, most of it marked by loss of life, and Kolbert chronicles it compellingly, whether she’s traipsing through bat caves in New England or exploring Panama for golden frogs. [Pulitzer Prize winner]

15. (2015) American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple
America’s opioid addiction isn’t an accident. It’s a seedy crime story borne of greed and lax government oversight.

16. (2015) Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Heartbreaking journey through the looking-glass of race relations in America, as told in a letter to his son. [Pulitzer Prize finalist]

17. (2015) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
A brisk and lively account of where we came from and how we got here.

18. (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Mayer’s investigation pulled up the rock to show the dirty money sloshing underneath.

19. (2016) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
Desmond’s stunning account of how fragile the American cycle of housing and homelessness is stems from his immersive journalism and a thoroughgoing but compassionate sociology. [Pulitzer Prize winner]

20. (2017) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
This shocking detective story about the Osage in Oklahoma will haunt you, as few murder mysteries can, because of how it intersects with that unique horror of Americana — namely, its racism.

21. (2018) Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
Blight manages to humanize this icon, with all his fears and flaws, while still conveying his charisma, intellect, idealism, and sheer bravery. [Pulitzer Prize winner]

22. (2018) Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
A scary explanation of our online world, told with enough examples to give you pause every time you read an article or see a picture.

23. (2018) The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger
The cyber wars more commonly associated with science-fiction are demonstrated with chilling clarity in this frightening examination of our many digital vulnerabilities.

24. (2019) Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
This deeply reported history of The Troubles reveals all the irony, tragedy, and craziness that beset Northern Ireland, starting in the late 1960s. And it speaks volumes about the power of memory in every era.

25. (2019) She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
Journalism procedurals aren’t as common as their police counterpart, but when they’re done well they’re just as exciting and, in this case, hugely consequential. All the President’s Men for the 21st century.

Joe Hayden is a professor of journalism at the University of Memphis.

Yes, that’s “Confederates in the attic” you’re hearing now, but it’s the living who are rattling their chains, a ruckus caused by our lack of understanding of the past. Like many Southern cities, Memphis is wrestling with ghosts these days.

One of ours is Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose bronze likeness sits atop a horse in Health Sciences Park. Calls to remove the statue have sparked controversy, but they shouldn’t. Defenders of the site today seem to have forgotten who Forrest was, why the tribute was put there in the first place, and even the purpose of monuments generally.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

According to historian Charles Royster, Forrest “was a minor player in some major battles and a major player in minor battles.” But he was also responsible for the massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, an atrocity that drew widespread condemnation all across the country. Before the war, Forrest trafficked in slaves and acquired a “notorious” reputation even within his home state, and he helped found the Ku Klux Klan, the nation’s oldest continuing terrorist organization.

His memorial was completed in 1905, a time when the South was reclaiming its connection to the Lost Cause and trying to rehabilitate its military leaders, and doing so while redoubling efforts to subjugate African Americans through segregation, discrimination, and violence. The two things were closely connected. After all, this was the heyday of lynching. Yet those defending Confederate statues seem keen to ignore or minimize that part of the past.

Many people refer to these artworks themselves as history. But they’re really statements about history. And sometimes we get these salutes wrong or change our minds or rethink what we once thought. Sometimes we learn things about the individuals commemorated in these tributes that make them embarrassing or worse. But if you insist otherwise, follow your own logic: If erecting a statue is history, then so is removing it.

Would you have told the Hungarians not to remove the statue of Joseph Stalin in 1956? Were they erasing history? Whitewashing the past? Hardly. The people who launched the uprising that fall were attempting to overthrow a Soviet puppet regime that oppressed them, and having to stare at the symbol of that oppression was an insult too great and grievous to bear.

A colleague of mine recently compared monuments to books in a library — some good, some not, but would you really want even the disreputable ones taken off the shelf, he asked? Actually, yes. Librarians cull their collections all the time. So although his argument may at first sound persuasive, the analogy is wrong. Monuments aren’t books. They’re brands, publicly endorsed and often supported. They enjoy a prominence not easily escaped and a validation not easily denied.

It’s easy to show equanimity or insouciance when you’re not a member of a group that’s been terrorized. It’s easy to say, even with the best of intentions, that monuments to villains are a way to remind us of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come, and “wouldn’t it be splendid if we just used them as a history lesson.” Yet no one would expect Jews to tolerate a statue of Joseph Mengele in a nearby park. Or Catholics to put up with a statue of Queen Elizabeth.

It’s true that almost all historical figures have their detractors, but why preserve monuments to people who actively tried to vanquish whole groups? Why salute individuals with murderous or genocidal reputations?

There are alternatives. Plenty of Americans — North and South, black and white — brought us together. Pay tribute to them.

In the meantime, pack up these old Confederate statues and put them in museums. They don’t deserve to adorn city spaces in the 21st century. Not only do they fail to represent all of us, but these vestiges of apartheid are opposed to and stand as a painful affront to many of us. They may be a “heritage” in the sense that they have been passed down from ancestors, but some things we inherit turn out to be oddities we’d rather keep in the attic than hang in the dining room.

It works the other way, too. Some things we once celebrated, such as the Forrest statue, obscure ugly truths. As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has written, “Remembrance is always a form of forgetting.” It is a means of coping, too, of trying to make peace with the past and with oneself. That’s the reason we create heroes, memorialize them, and sometimes scorn and eventually replace them.

Ghosts don’t haunt us, it turns out. We haunt them.

Joe Hayden is a historian and a professor of journalism at the University of Memphis.