Books like The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

Barred from university education and ministerial roles, most women in the 1700s did not have opportunities to write commentaries or sermons. Instead, some female authors turned to poetry and devotional writing as a vehicle for biblical interpretation. According to literary scholar Natasha Duquette, female poets such as Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved African American servant, “veiled” their dissenting viewpoints in religious verse. By “clothing” their calls for social justice in genres considered acceptable for female authors, these poets and devotional writers ensured a wider readership for their provocative perspectives on the Bible and society. 

A poet, playwright, essayist, teacher, and activist, Jordan had more than 25 published works, including seven books of essays. 

As a feminist and women’s studies teacher and scholar who was focused on bringing race into the center of my activism and analysis, I learned so much from June Jordan. 
On Call, includes essays that explored intersectionality years before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and theorized the overlapping social constructions of race, class, and gender. 

The topics of the 18 essays are wide-ranging, from patriarchy, to Black English, to the enslaved 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley, and a hilarious short essay on the election of Ronald Reagan written in Black English. I taught “Report from the Bahamas” in almost all of my courses. 

Like all of her essays, it is written with a poet’s sensibility. Every word matters.  

In 1761, the slave ship Phillis departed from Africa and headed toward America. Among the human cargo was a young girl. Judging by her missing incisors, she was seven or eight years old. Soon after the ship’s arrival in Boston, John and Susann Wheatley purchased the girl and named her after the ship that had delivered her to them. Mrs. Wheatley taught their servant to read and write and introduced her to classical and English literature, including revered poets. Around 1765, Phillis began writing poetry, and her first poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” published in 1767, when she was only about fourteen years old, rendered her the first black person in America to publish a poem. Carretta’s collection of Wheatley’s work includes a fascinating, thoroughly researched introduction.

That enslaved people were considered commodities is no secret. But in this book, Daina Ramey Berry demonstrates how enslaved people were attached to monetary prices throughout their entire lives. Indeed, enslaved people were in the market even before they were born, and they remained in the market even after they had died. But Berry reminds us that enslaved people themselves understood that their “soul value,” and not their supposed economic value, defined who they really were.

While this started a little slowly, I was soon completely invested in the life of its unlikely hero. Fletcher Sinclair is a meme personified—he lives in his parent’s basement, plays video games all day, and consumes far too much of a particular sports drink. Then, a strange virus hits the world, eliminating all the men—except for Fletcher.

That the human race’s potential extinction should rest upon Fletcher’s shoulders both horrified and fascinated me. It was filled with twists and turns, which even I, as an author, didn’t see coming. No spoilers and no hyperbole, but Erik Dargitz invented the most brilliant post-apocalyptic cult I’ve ever read! Fans of Handmaiden’s Tale and Animal Farm will love this book.

Once Troy was conquered, the Greeks had to get back home. Few heroes managed this without drama, but even on this benchmark, Odysseus’ ten-year (a-hem) odyssey was an outlier.

You can read this as the first great traveller’s tale: the Odyssey will immerse you in a giant, detailed story world of gods, heroes, and monsters traversed by a protagonist famous for his clever schemes and his stretching of the truth.

Emily Wilson’s translation really can’t be beaten: she brings before our eyes and ears again a fantasy world given weight by very human stories of loss and longing.

What do we know about the Revolution, and why do we think we know it? Sometimes, even canonical events we think we know are not nearly as well-documented as we might think, like the Boston Tea Party.

This book is about history and memory, the gap between what happened when colonists threw the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, and how that event was remembered decades later. Drawing on the as-told-to-reminiscences of Tea Party participant George Robert Twelve Hewes, which were written down over half a century after the Tea Party took place, Young plumbs the gap between the “destruction of the tea,” as the event was known at the time, and the “Boston Tea Party,” a name which only emerged in the 19th century as Americans reimagining that revolt into the story of how America was made. 

Young shows us that accounts like Hewes’s had as much to… show more.

“To the youth of the world in whose spirit and courage rest the hope of eventual freedom for all mankind.” Thus begins Disney’s film version of this novel. Like Walt himself, this novel inspired a love of the history of our revolution in me at a young age.

Did you know that Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom is from this story? Johnny learns early in the story that “pride cometh before a fall,” but his personal struggles become subsumed in a cause greater than himself.

The author comes from an old Yankee family with ties to the revolution, and so do I. The commission of James Churchill as a Captain in the Massachusetts militia, signed by John Hancock, still hangs in the farmhouse where I grew up. It’s in her blood, and that comes through in this timeless classic. 

This is an obvious pick, I know. Still, it’s on record as the greatest adventure, the highest bar of duty and courage—and ultimately love.

Homer’s epic detailing Odysseus’ journey home from the Trojan War is fraught with peril and obstacles that would have made a lesser human give up and call it a day. 

Destiny called him away, but it was love that brought him home from war. At each crossroad Odysseus was offered an alternative, he chose to return to his wife, his son, and his land. He could have been made immortal.

He was offered riches and greater glory, and all the dude wanted was to kiss his wife and sleep in his own bed at the end of the day. Is that so much to ask?

The reason The Odyssey is on my list is to reflect the scale of destiny, and the answering and equal call… show more.

After flipping through a few pages, I was immediately engrossed by this book’s exquisite and thought-provoking illustrations. Mason and Miller showcase many cartographic techniques beyond what we commonly consider a map, ranging in scale from the globe to mountain ranges and river basins to cities and neighborhoods to factory floors. 

I was struck by the blend of creativity and artistry that went into creating these maps and how well this book showcased the wide range of possibilities for representing almost anything visually and cartographically. Including approximately 300 illustrations, the book has the feel of a coffee-table book and can be easily broken down and read in short chunks, although I found it hard to put down.