Books like Citizen-Protectors — picked by fans

I admire this book for its measured erudition on a topic (guns) that the author feels is the most formative cultural chasm in the US. Winkler, a renowned legal scholar, uses the 2008 Supreme Court Heller decision that enshrined the second amendment as an individual right to bear arms as the touchstone for a riveting and more wide-ranging investigation of the history of gun rights as well as gun control laws. Winkler finds historical precedents for the concept of an individual right (if not a mandate, in some cases) to bear arms.

However, what I found most surprising is Winkler’s account of the equally sturdy and deeply-rooted history of gun control and regulation. This revises the popular wisdom that gun control, essentially, has no history—that the US was a land of unfettered gun-toting and gun-owning that was only later thwarted by modern, liberal gun restrictions. On the contrary, by the… show more.

Busse offers the new perspective of an insider—an erstwhile gun executive. I’ve always held that the gun industry has gotten far too little attention historically, and that commercial forces substantially helped to create and then maintain the American gun mystique and culture long after the “frontier” closed. Busse’s work shows just how explicitly the gun industry today, since 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, relies on “manufactured fear” to push products. The book teems with examples of fear marketing, including endorsements from social media celebrities that created a new breed of “couch commandos,” steeped in the “glorification of violence, the utter rejection of political correctness, and the freewheeling masculinity and objectification of women.” And in Busse’s view it’s not just that gun marketing has changed, but that the gun industry has transformed American culture itself, radicalizing it and shifting it toward authoritarianism.

We’ve seen and felt this malevolence of… show more.

Rather than reprising hackneyed debates between the usual political actors—for example, gun control liberals versus gun rights libertarians—this book argues that American ‘gun culture’ was never really about hunting, freedom fighters, the militia, or constitutional liberty in the first place. From the country’s inception, Dunbar-Ortiz describes, guns were about racial subjugation, the genocide of Native Americans, the enforcement of enslavement, and the privileges and wealth that flowed from this subordination to the dominating class.

For Dunbar-Ortiz, the use of guns for subjugation and the expropriation of labor, land, and wealth from non-white populations wasn’t lamentably incidental to the American gun culture but at its very heart. I especially appreciate how the author shifts the terrain of the gun discussion: This book left me wondering if we spend too much time thinking about what guns have meant in the abstract and too little about what guns have done in the specific—the… show more.

A full quarter-century later, what did we learn about the how and why of modern American school shootings from the 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School in Colorado? Not much, apparently, since they still occur with random regularity.

But it’s all here, in Cullen’s remarkable account, in granular detail—the who, how, and why of two rather isolated boys who donned their dusters and walked into their school with guns blazing. The subject matter might be sickening, but this indelible portrait of the perps and victims is essential reading if we have any hope of stemming the madness. 

Another journalist whom I have met in real life the award-winning British journalist and broadcaster who writes for The Guardian, Sam Bourne is the literary pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland. To Kill A Man is a classic thriller with a climactic twist, a gripping tour de force through American feminism up against violent misogyny, ambition and struggle, politics, and crime. He writes with both simplicity and complexity, insight, and pacy readability.   

I found this to be a strong debut collection. Its fascinating and thought-provoking short stories center around the theme of womanhood in realities slightly different from our own, often with hints of the supernatural or near-future sci-fi elements.

The standouts were so powerful that I had to pause at times to contemplate the often heartbreaking and poignant observations regarding bodily safety, beauty, fertility, and power. I especially love that this collection includes poetry as well, which adds another layer of depth to the collection.

This is another book that personally enlightened me to the core of my sister’s prosecution: misogyny. Before reading Kate Manne’s book, I had a broad and incomplete understanding of “misogyny,” despite it affecting every aspect of our society.

After reading this book—and understanding that misogyny is the way that women are controlled and punished in a patriarchal system—I couldn’t unsee the evidence of misogyny all around me. We cannot challenge gender-based violence without first understanding its fundamental building blocks.

The title says it all. I choose Patai’s withering account of Orwell’s irredeemable misogyny not because I think she is right but because I think she onto something in him and in his life and times. After Koestler, another dark corner.

This novel is partly fictional, but also based on the author’s life and traumatic first marriage. There’s suspense for sure and a range of feelings. I cried hard in some parts, smiled in others, and felt sorry, relieved, and even joyful in other sections. I had no idea what would happen next. The story played out like a movie in my head, full of my two favorite things: emotional engagement and nervous fear for the main character. This is a thriller that follows a woman on a daunting personal journey that will pluck at your heartstrings.

It came as no surprise to me, having spent so much time in the country, that Korea has long been and still is a sexist society, and this book illustrates that sexism brutally. When I lived there, my good friend, a woman, was a professor of biochemistry, and she struggled in her career the way men didn’t have to. Also, while people thought nothing of my going out to a pub with my male friends, it was somewhat scandalous when I did the same with this woman. In this novel, set in more recent times, a young woman has similar troubles trying to find her way. For many readers, it has served as a wake-up call for Korean society.