Books that imagine the future
fascinate me—Station Eleven was a favorite a few years ago—and The
Wild Shore imagines a strange future for my native Southern California.
Written in 1984, it presents a world of isolated communities without modern
conveniences and with only vague and fading recollections of the past. Living
by harvesting local resources and bartering with other small communities, the
young residents of this village hope for change and toy with joining a
resistance movement.
The older village member who teaches reading and recounts
his own version of history is brilliantly drawn. I was most intrigued by this
of the three books in the trilogy, although they are all worthwhile (and the
historian figure recurs cleverly across all three).
The Wild Shore is the first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's highly-acclaimed Three Californias Trilogy.
2047: For the small Pacific Coast community of San Onofre, life in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear attack is a matter of survival, a day-to-day struggle to stay alive. But young Hank Fletcher dreams of the world that might have been, and might yet be--and dreams of playing a crucial role in America's rebirth.
Jennifer
Morgan’s brilliant new book, Reckoning with Slavery, explains the
creation of racial slavery: how people were turned into commodities, not simply
by selling their bodies and their labor but by redefining their most intimate
relationships out of legal existence.
By denying kin relations, European
enslavers—she focuses on the English—erected a gendered system of exploitation.
She connects the rise of capitalism and the new propensity to count things and
people to the changes that made slavery possible in the form it took in the
Atlantic.
Morgan also reads little bits of information carefully, showing the
reader their significance—her writing and readings of evidence are quite
brilliant. On a disturbing subject, this book is very smart and readable.
In Reckoning with Slavery Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery. Throughout…
Barkskins is a Big Book—long, yes,
but also epic in its coverage: it has a cast of characters that stretch over
centuries and move across the world.
An environmental novel, it explores the
assault on forests, beginning with men bound to labor in the Canadian wilderness
cutting down trees, through the lumbering industry there and elsewhere, up to
the modern-day environmental movement.
Proulx deals with how the landscape
changed and what that meant for the indigenous people, the animals, the
waterways, and finally, the climate. Wide-ranging and full of quirky
characters, the novel is by turns intriguing, funny, and horrifying.
Proulx is
the author of many great books. Her writing is beautiful, and her compassion
for people and the natural world is memorable.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017
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From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world's forests.
In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters - barkskins. Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to…
The World of Plymouth Plantation shows that early settlement, often treated as isolated, was embedded in
a network of trade and sociability. In addition to neighboring Wampanoag
peoples, the English residents interacted with fishermen, merchants, investors,
and numerous others who passed through the region.
Plymouth was linked to
England, Europe, the Caribbean, Virginia, the American interior, and the
coastal ports of West Africa. Drawing out many colorful stories—of stolen red
stockings, a teenager playing with gunpowder aboard a ship, the gift of a chicken
hurried through the woods to a sickbed—the book reveals the early North
American experience beyond familiar events like the first Thanksgiving.
The
World of Plymouth Plantation recovers the sense of real life there and sets
the colony properly within global history.
