Category: 3-BookTalkDaily

Today I talked to Rick McIntyre about the first two books of his ongoing The Alpha Wolves of Yellowstone series.

The first book we discuss, The Rise of Wolf 8: Witnessing the Triumph of Yellowstone's Underdog, introduces us to the wolves of Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone National Park was once home to an abundance of wild wolves—but park rangers killed the last of their kind in the 1920s. Decades later, the rangers brought them back, with the first wolves arriving from Canada in 1995. This is the incredible true story of one of those wolves. Wolf 8 struggles at first—he is smaller than the other pups, and often bullied—but soon he bonds with an alpha female whose mate was shot. An unusually young alpha male, barely a teenager in human years, Wolf 8 rises to the occasion, hunting skillfully, and even defending his family from the wolf who killed his father. But soon he faces a new opponent: his adopted son, who mates with a violent alpha female. Can Wolf 8 protect his valley without harming his protégé?

The second book we discuss, The Reign of Wolf 21: The Saga of Yellowstone's Legendary Druid Pack, continues the story.

In this compelling follow-up to the national bestseller The Rise of Wolf 8, Rick McIntyre profiles one of Yellowstone’s most revered alpha males, Wolf 21. Leader of the Druid Peak Pack, Wolf 21 was known for his unwavering bravery, his unusual benevolence (unlike other alphas, he never killed defeated rival males), and his fierce commitment to his mate, the formidable Wolf 42. Wolf 21 and Wolf 42 were attracted to each other the moment they met—but Wolf 42’s jealous sister interfered viciously in their relationship. After an explosive insurrection within the pack, the two wolves came together at last as leaders of the Druid Peak Pack, which dominated the park for more than 10 years. McIntyre recounts the pack’s fascinating saga with compassion and a keen eye for detail, drawing on his many years of experience observing Yellowstone wolves in the wild. His outstanding work of science writing offers unparalleled insight into wolf behavior and Yellowstone’s famed wolf reintroduction project. It also offers a love story for the ages.

Rick McIntyre has spent more than fifty years watching wolves in America’s national parks, twenty-five of those years in Yellowstone, where he has accumulated over 100,000 wolf sightings and educated the public about the park’s most famous wolves. He has spoken about the Yellowstone wolves with 60 Minutes, NPR, and CBC, and he is profiled extensively in Nate Blakeslee’s American Wolf and in international publications. He lives in Silver Gate, Montana.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Today I talked to Carol J. Adams about two of her classic texts that have recently been republished.

The first book we discuss, first published in 1990, is The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, a landmark text in the ongoing debates about animal rights. In the two decades since, the book has inspired controversy and heated debate. The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that what, or more precisely who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture, and that the meanings attached to meat eating are often clustered around virility. We live in a world in which men still have considerable power over women, both in public and in private. Carol Adams argues that gender politics is inextricably related to how we view animals, especially animals who are consumed. Further, she argues that vegetarianism and fighting for animal rights fit perfectly alongside working to improve the lives of disenfranchised and suffering people, under the wide umbrella of compassionate activism.

The second book we discuss, first published in 2004, is The Pornography of Meat. For 30 years, since the publication of her landmark book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams and her readers have continued to document and hold to account the degrading interplay of language about women, domesticated animals, and meat in advertising, politics, and media. Serving as sequel and visual companion, The Pornography of Meat charts the continued influence of this language and the fight against it. This new edition includes more than 300 images, most of them new, and brings the book up to date to include expressions of misogyny in online media and advertising, the #MeToo movement, and the impact of Donald Trump and white supremacy on our political language. Never has this book--or Adams's analysis--been more relevant.

Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals, and The Pornography of Meat. She is the co-editor of several pathbreaking anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen). Her work is the subject of two recent anthologies, Defiant Daughters: 21 Women of Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Art of the Animal: 14 Women Artists Explore The Sexual Politics of Meat, in which a new generation of feminists, artists, and activists respond to Adams' groundbreaking work.

Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine.

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Steven Blush's new book Bustin' Balls (Feral Press, 2020) tells the strange but true story of World Team Tennis (1974-1978) that attempted to transform the prim and proper individual sport of tennis into a rowdy blue-collar league. Billie Jean King and her partners merged feminism and civil rights with queer lifestyle, pop culture, and a progressive political agenda to create a dazzling platform for the finest tennis players of the day to become overnight stars. Filled with rare photographs and images of WTT ephemera, this book recounts King's vision of a competitive tennis league with mixed-sex teams and looser rules that encouraged fast and aggressive play propelled tennis into a television fixture and the players into household names.

Bustin' Balls presents in-depth stories and history of the WTT and tennis in the 1970s, including Evonne Goolagong who fought racism throughout her life as the first indigenous woman to win at Wimbledon and a member of the Pittsburgh Triangles. Chris Evert of the Los Angeles Strings became America’s sweetheart. Billie Jean King played for the Philadelphia Freedoms at the height of Bicentennial fervor and was feted by Elton John in the song, “Philadelphia Freedom.” While tabloids followed the nightlife exploits and made pin-ups of Ilie Nastase, Jimmy Connors, and Vitas Gerulitis.

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Scientists have scientific reason and use the scientific method. Humanists have... Emotion? Close reading? Not so, argues Eric Hayot in

Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan (Columbia UP, 2021). Contrary to popular belief, the humanities involve both reasoning and methods. Humanist reason, Hayot shows, is philosophically and historically grounded and applicable to almost every discipline. Part history of philosophy, part methods handbook, and part manifesto, Humanist Reason will change the way we advocate for the humanities in the twenty-first century.

Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context.

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What makes racist feelings and ideas objectionable? In his book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (Red Globe, 2011), M. Fakhry Davids, a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, argues that racism, like the impulse to destroy or act on hatred, is an ineluctable part of us all. Borrowing, but also augmenting the work of his fellow neo-Kleinians (particularly John Steiner and Herbert Rosenfeld) on “psychic retreats” and “defensive organizations”, he names the “internal racist organization” as a normal part of the mind, deeming it a non-pathological component of psychic structure.

Davids' thinking has a decidedly hopeful tinge. If accepted, it promises to help open up the kinds of conversations clinically and otherwise that can be had about racist feelings. After all, if they are average and expectable, they are human. And what is accepted as human can potentially be talked through and about, which promises to constrain harmful action.

What I love about Davids' thinking is that in updating a psychoanalytic model of mind that accounts for racism, he wipes political correctness and the super ego off the table. By placing the “internal racist organization” as an equal player inside of us, alongside the Oedipal, the ego and the id, it becomes something that you just can’t wish away.

That said, if we accept his argument, we do find ourselves contending with the age old problem of the drives, or the paranoid schizoid, wherein managing ourselves in relation to the lure of destructiveness (of which racist feelings play their part) is a life long project. The hope is that if we can come to accept racist thinking as a response to overwhelming and primitive anxieties, (rather than a moral failing), we can see it as a warning sign that internally we are askew. Following Davids, racism can never be expunged (as seems to be the neoliberal fantasy) from the self. In fact, and truly this is the last word, it follows us to the grave.

Tracy D. Morgan: Psychoanalyst, LCSW-R, M.Phil., Editor, New Books in Psychoanalysis. 

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What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being.

Jonathan S. Holloway's The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2021) considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.

Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network.

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Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.

Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.

Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.

C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego.

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The Puritans of Early America did not start out with gendered society and piety. Instead, Monica D. Fitzerald suggests, growing tensions between lay men and clergy over what was perceived as a feminized piety led toward a gradual separation of masculinity and femininity into distinct spheres. In Puritans Behaving Badly: Gender, Religion, and Punishment in Early America (Cambridge UP, 2020), Fitzgerald presents original research in the church disciplinary records of censure cases among Puritan congregations in the first three generations of American Puritanism. The records tell a fascinating story about how, even though the Puritan ministers advocated a holistic spirituality that was at once inwardly pietistic and externally dutiful, the lists of sins and confessions recorded in the chronicles of church discipline cases indicate that only men were being held accountable for sins of duty and honor, and only women for sins of personal spirituality and heart religion. Filled with vivid tales of squabbles, rifts, and deadly rivalries, Fitzgerald's book is sure to fascinate and delight readers interested in the development of religion and culture in early America. Follow Monica on Twitter (@mofitz66), or visit her book page on Cambridge Core. 

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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This ambitious work explores the literary and cultural production about Russian peasants and African Americans in the post-emancipation period. Brickell Bellows draws on visual images from advertisements to oil paintings as well as novellas, novels, pamphlets, and reports in English and Russian. 

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (UNC Press, 2020) provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

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Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign organized millions of Chinese peasants into communes in a misguided attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture with disastrous effects. Catastrophic famine lingered as the global cholera pandemic of the early 1960s spread rampantly through the infected waters of southeastern coastal China. Confronted with a political crisis and the seventh global cholera pandemic in recorded history, the communist government committed to social restructuring in order to affirm its legitimacy and prevent transmission of the disease. Focusing on the Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang Province, the area most seriously stricken by cholera at the time, Xiaoping Fang demonstrates how China’s pandemic was far more than a health incident; it became a significant social and political influence during a dramatic transition for the People’s Republic.

China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist.

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