93 Books Like Madder

Before becoming a published writer, I was a lawyer litigating primarily large, multi-district environmental insurance coverage cases. I became familiar with the many ways by which we damage our precious natural resources, be it groundwater or soil or the air we breathe. Beginning with Rachel Carson, we have rich literature that speaks to the degradation of the planet, including the devastating changes wrought by global warming. The stories in this anthology speak to the physical and emotional topography of our current climate crisis, from a Sami woman who studies fish populations to a Wisconsin man contemplating the animals who make his trailer a portal to a world unsullied by humans. Fish & Water is a smart collection on a topic we ignore at our peril.

I love swamps and streams and rivers (and I’m learning to love the ocean), and I especially love the miniature ecosystems that Kimmerer studies and describes with such gentle care in this book. Sure, everyone’s read Braiding Sweetgrass. (Wait, you haven’t? What are you doing here?! Go! Read!) But have you read the one about moss?

Both books reminded me of why I am drawn to science, of how structured observation and research can illuminate complex and dynamic processes. But I found the science in this one more compelling. It’s a collection of graceful retellings focused on the intricacies of the exact kinds of watery habitats I love best.

Susanne Paola Antonetta’s first book, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir taught me how memoir can be compiled through multiple lenses—one that invites into the author’s self-view and another through which you can learn about place and environmental degradation. With two (or more) questions, who-I-am becomes complicated and textured. Antonetta’s new The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here illustrates that understanding ourselves comes only through looking at those selves through other texts, other people, our current understanding of ourselves, science, place, and our childhood’s vision of the world.

Antonetta takes quantum entanglement, her grandmother’s Christian Science beliefs, and her own account of spending summers at the shore in a small hut with her family whose history of mental health—and professional accomplishments—is complexly textured. In a section called “The Problem of the Past,” Antonetta describes the behavior of photon particles. In the double-slit experiment, if you send one beam of light through… show more.

Rolf Halden makes reading about the environment fun. He is a microbiologist working at the Arizona State University’s Center for BioDesign. He is working to invite people to pay attention to the lifestream of the chemicals and other substances humans invent and then dispose of without a thought. For example, at the water treatment plant, he discovered piles of contact lenses because people just throw them in the toilet. Just throw them in the garbage can people. Plastic is still bad news on land but it’s even worse in our waterways.

Halden himself didn’t think of the results of his own contact-lens throwing away until he visited the treatment plant. By recognizing that humans will be humans, he advocates for us trying not to make stuff or use stuff that can’t be easily dissolved in the environment because it’s nearly impossible to know where all this human-made stuff goes or… show more.

George Reid Andrews is one of the founders of Afro-Latin American Studies. In Blackness in the White Nation, he combines the study of Afro-Uruguayan music and performance of candombe, the African-based rhythm that Uruguay shares with Argentina (as these countries share tango too), with the history of Afro-Uruguayan political mobilization in the twentieth century. Andrews guides readers into this story by telling them about his experience of learning candombe, and marching playing the drums on the streets of Montevideo, which makes this story unique. We learn how a country who depicts itself as predominantly populated by descendants of Europeans, appropriated African-based music and dance as a national rhythm.

I spent many years of my youth flicking through history books on the World Cup and learning about legends like Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Pele, and Maradona, and have always been obsessed with the greatest event in sport. This book tells the definitive story of every event from Uruguay in 1930 up to Russia in 2018. 

Glanville’s style brings out the unique nature of every tournament and the teams, players, and coaches within them, making it much more than a series of brief match reports, which can be a challenge in chronological histories.

This is really three novels in one—three distinct stories of three generations of strong women spanning the 20th century in South America—and I loved them all. While each woman lived in different times and found strength through different means, they shared the common bonds of womanhood and motherhood and of stories about small miracles passed down for generations. 

De Robertis weaves an engaging saga with captivating, poetic prose that immerses the reader in a different time and place. I could taste the bitter mate tea, feel the humid air along the La Rambla river, and see the haze of cigarette smoke in a backroom bar. I return to it often, just to read a page or two, like returning for another sip from a fine wine.

Five women find salvation in each other in a beachside hamlet on Uruguay’s eastern coast. With no running water or electricity, the isolated Cabo Polonio becomes their sanctuary, a place where these cantoras (women who "sing”) can exercise their voice – something denied them as queer women under the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1970s and 80s.

The book follows the friends over the span of 35 years as they continue to return to this family home of theirs, sometimes together, sometimes with new lovers. Beautifully written, the book is brimming with heart and is a testament to the power of activism and solidarity. 

This edited volume does a lot of things, allowing authors who have published in Spanish to advance their arguments in English as well as establishing conversations among historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists. Some authors focus on the production and consumption of culture, like Matthew Karush with his examination of the Afro-Argentinean guitar player Oscar Alemán, and Rebekah Pite’s chapter on food history. Ezequiel Adamovsky and Eduardo Elena essays center on race and class during the foundation of Peronism as a political movement, and representations of skin color in politics since mid-twentieth century. While Peronism has never openly challenged conceptions of a White Argentina, some non-white Argentineans sought Peronism as a space to challenge ideas of whiteness.

Long before Edward Snowden there was Phillip Agee. A former CIA officer, Agee turned whistleblower, publishing this unauthorized account of his life undercover and exposing many of the “Company’s” operations in the process. Agee worked for the CIA in Ecuador, Uruguay, and Mexico. He claimed the turning point came in Uruguay where he listened to the beating of a political prisoner (whose name he had provided to the police) while the police chief turned up the volume of a soccer game on the radio. His matter-of-fact diary included a controversial appendix of agent and officer names and cryptonyms. Incensed at the endangerment of its assets, the CIA sued and pursued Agee, who fled the country and spent the rest of his life denouncing the tactics of his former employer.