History, Politics, and Global Connectivity | Recommended Reading, Part 4

What can the past tell us about the moment we’re in today? How can understanding the pressing issues that have faced the world before COVID-19 better prepare us for life after the pandemic? We asked New School faculty to share their recommendations for books on history, politics, and global connections that speak to our current moment.

“It’s certainly worth revisiting his book for lessons and insights as we tackle the current pandemic and the myriad global challenges to come.” — Rachel Meltzer

Recommendation from Rachel Meltzer, Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Chair of the MS Public and Urban Policy Program:
My recommendation is Benjamin Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World (2013). Written seven years ago, but prescient in many ways. He talks about the rigidness and constraints of nation states to work together to tackle complex contemporary problems and how localities are much more nimble and innovative. He documents cases of cities across the globe where the local government takes the lead on public problems and promotes cities working across boundaries to share ideas and create global networks for problem solving.

I think this vision is particularly relevant for the times we’re in: local and state governments have taken the lead in navigating the COVID-19 crisis, and in managing the inequitable way it has manifested itself, in the face of a national leadership void. It’s certainly worth revisiting his book for lessons and insights as we tackle the current pandemic and the myriad global challenges to come.

Recommendation from Hazel Clark, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies:
In recent weeks I have been re-reading Slow Living by Wendy Parkins and Geoffrey Craig (Berg, 2006). I first read the book soon after it came out, to inform my thinking on fashion (which is not actually included in the contents). With its attention to the likes of food, space and place, time and the politics of slow living, it remains a relevant and valuable source of information and provides a potential road map for action in current times.

“Like many people, I have gone back to basics in terms of exercise, which for me means a lot of running.” — Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela

Recommendations from Natalia Mehlman-Petrzela, Associate Professor of History, Director of the First Year Program at Lang:
Regarding our current moment, I have just returned to Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, an important book on the costs of connecting primarily virtually, which feels both like a relic of “Before” and like a crucial read right now as nearly everything in our lives moves online in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago when the book came out.

Like many people, I have gone back to basics in terms of exercise, which for me means a lot of running. I just re-read Jim Fixx’s 1977 classic The Complete Book of Running, both as part of my research on the rise of fitness culture and as a lens on the origins of a pastime that so many people (based on social media, at least) seem to be discovering anew. Especially now that running is the only alone time for some of us quarantining with family, Fixx’s idea that running is liberation feels especially relevant!

For pure escapism, I have been enjoying Richard Snow’s Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World. It’s a really rich biography of a place — Disneyland opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California — that is a welcome escape from the dramas of right now.

Recommendation from Alex Schwartz, Professor of Urban Policy at the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment:

Beryl Satter’s Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban (Picador, 2010) is both a trenchant analysis of redlining, racial segregation, and discrimination in Chicago, and the story of a decades-long lawsuit initiated by the author’s short-lived father against the Federal Housing Administration and other financial institutions to achieve justice for African American families who were denied access to traditional home mortgages and pushed into abusive “contract sales.” The book is easily among the most insightful and most readable analysis of racial discrimination in housing. It provides essential historical context for understanding the nation’s acute racial disparities in income, wealth, and health, including those laid bare by COVID-19.

Recommendation from Julia Foulkes, Professor of History and author of A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (University of Chicago Press, 2016):

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that I’m dreaming about public space at this moment of quarantine — I long to be outside, among strangers, experiencing what I often think of New York at its finest: the explosion of the arts in parks in the summer. Though Mariana Mogilevich’s The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York is forthcoming in June, I’ve read pieces of it as articles. This forthcoming book will help me dream — and perhaps also guide us in thinking how we revive a New York with inclusion and equity at the forefront of any plan.

“Economies around the globe are struggling to survive and most governments, just as the Soviet Union in its waning years, show limited preparedness, capacity and expertise to deal with the disaster.” — Nina Khruscheva

Recommendations from Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs and author of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019):
In the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, my thoughts continuously return to Chernobyl, nuclear disaster of cosmic proportion. In 1986, this area in Ukraine, then the Soviet Republic, suffered from the catastrophe that was not immediately made public, in part due to the Soviet Union’s habitual shrouding any crisis in secrecy. But even more because it was the first of its kind in history, the magnitude of its human and ecological impact began to be understood only decades later, with other countries such as Japan beginning to experience their own nuclear and climate tragedies. Now, in a similarly unprecedented manner, Covid-19 is testing all humanity all at once, pushing our endurance to the limits. Economies around the globe are struggling to survive and most governments, just as the Soviet Union in its waning years, show limited preparedness, capacity and expertise to deal with the disaster that in its incomprehensible reach outpaces even the Chernobyl tragedy.

To better learn from history and politics, books that address this kind of catastrophe, which writer Svetlana Alexievich called “a chronicle of the future,” today should be on top of everyone’s list. After all, environmental, climate and other concerns are getting more and more acute and the planet is suffering from all sorts of man-made mismanagement.

Though first published in English in 2005, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, the newer, excellent, translation by journalist and writer Keith Gessen was released in paperback last year. Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was first to provide a grippingly human and heartbreaking story of the Chernobyl tragedy. She warned that though at the time we, the Soviets, were the first people to go through such a tragedy, a future will hold many more.

Another book that deserves an almost equal attention is Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (Simon & Schuster, 2019). Though it is a New York Times Best Book of 2019, this is not why one should read it. Extensively researched and meticulously narrated, this captivating account of the tragedy keeps pace of immediacy and urgency of the man-made disaster. Heroism of the reactor operators, the minute by minute tense drama and struggle to contain the nuclear meltdown, an overall sense of little premonition of what comes next, a confused and inadequate response from Moscow — all details of the tragedy that sped up the demise of the Soviet Union unfold in the rapid clip terrifying succession. After all, today we, too, have no premonition of what comes next, and witness those confused and inadequate responses to the Coronavirus pandemic not just from Moscow, but Beijing, Washington D.C., Rome, Deli and the list goes on. As once the reactor operators, our new heroes are doctors, nurses and many others who keep life moving all the while it is at a global standstill.

Recommendations from Gina Walker, Professor Of Women’s Studies and director of The New Historia, and Ellen Freeberg, Associate Dean of Faculty And Curriculum for NSSR:
In the surreal quiet of this too real time, we read women who have been here before us: Virginia Woolf, Christine de Pizan, and Hannah Arendt. An odd assortment, we acknowledge, but each left us testaments to her deepest thoughts in crisis. In some of their darkest moments, these women sought and found solace by evoking the struggles of earlier foremothers, using their lives as a template for reflecting on their own.

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) assumed that she couldn’t find any other foremothers than the ones she already knew because she was “locked out” of the libraries, if not in reality, then because of her rage at her lack of formal university training. Instead, Woolf envisioned the project of feminist historical recovery and the possibility of establishing a female intellectual tradition. She dodged the chance to champion it, denying her own epistemological authority.

Near the end of her productive life, Christian de Pizan (c. 1364–1431) wrote Le Ditié de Jehann d’Arc /Song to Joan of Arc (1429), a joyous account of the triumph of the French forces, led by Joan of Arc, an inspired peasant, over the English during the Hundred Years War. She writes:

I, Christine, who have wept for eleven years in a walled
abbey where I have lived ever since Charles (how strange
this is!) the King’s son–dare I say it?–fled in haste
from Paris, I who have lived enclosed there on account of
the treachery, now, for the first time, begin to laugh.

Christine de Pizan is revered for her Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a Rosseta Stone for contempary feminists, that links her woman’s experience of the isolation of historical misogyny with ours.

In addition, we also recommend Hannah Arendt’s (1906–1975) Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman. In this experimental female biography, Hannah Arendt recreates an immersive, lonely, interior world inhabited by the prominent 18th century Jewess and salonniere, Rahel Varnhagen. Drawing from Rahel’s voluminous letter collection, Arendt lays bare the painful affairs, self doubts, and suffocating social anti-Semitism that Rahel desperately wanted others to understand and that Arendt herself had experienced as a young woman. Arendt shaped her project in the late 1920s, while witnessing the economic collapse of German democracy and the growing effects of antisemitism.

The Julien J. Studly Graduate Program in International Affairs is also collecting reading recommendations during this time. From Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin to The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, head to their blog for more recommendations on what their community is reading in this moment.

Author’s note: If you’re interested in purchasing any of the books above, we hope you consider ordering through your local bookseller! We’ve linked each book to its respective website on IndieBound.com, for easy access in finding and supporting a bookstore near you.

Want more recommended reading? Check out our previous Recommended Reading posts: Part 1: Poetry for Difficult Times, Part 2: Cooking and Crafts to #StayHome, and Part 3: Environment + Sustainability.