Daring to Be Free, by Sudhir Hazareesingh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This history reconstructs the extraordinary stories of “fugitive resisters” to examine the crucial role that captives played, over centuries, in dismantling the transatlantic slave trade. If abolition was impossible without decrees by Western governments, Hazareesingh argues, it was unthinkable without enslaved peoples’ own push for emancipation. Documenting diverse acts of rebellion from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, his book shows how guerrilla strategies—influenced by spiritual traditions and characterized by solidarity across social groups—were deployed from the earliest days of enslavement, and helped to shape ideological currents of autonomy and self-determination.
The Second Estate, by Ray D. Madoff (Chicago). The aristocrats of France’s ancien régime did not have to pay taxes. America’s modern-day plutocrats, this bracing book contends, enjoy a similar privilege. By eschewing salaries, lobbying Congress to gut the estate tax, and contriving elaborate writeoffs and work-arounds, the very rich have placed much of their wealth beyond the reach of the state. To finance America’s teetering Social Security system and to pay for programs such as Medicare, the federal government relies primarily on revenues collected from working people. The U.S. tax code is around seven thousand pages long; Madoff makes its failures gripping and accessible in a book that can be read, with as much pleasure as indignation, in an afternoon.
What We’re Reading
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino (Celadon). In this diabolical satirical thriller, a millennial woman resorts to extreme measures to secure the million-dollar house of her dreams. Margo, who works in P.R., and her husband, a government lawyer, have been outbid on eleven homes in the Washington, D.C., area, where they live. Determined to escape “real estate purgatory” through property ownership and start a family, Margo stalks a London-bound couple in the hope of snapping up their brick Colonial in a posh suburban neighborhood. Kashino, a former real-estate reporter, playfully charts the increasingly unhinged tactics Margo employs as she takes the art of negotiation to a frightening level.
A Love Story from the End of the World, by Juhea Kim (Ecco). Set in the near future, these finely wrought stories examine lives and relationships amid climate change and technological innovation. Characters are at once accustomed to and unnerved by the measures that allow for their survival: a “biodome” that protects against perpetual sandstorms; ships that house humanity after the land has become unlivable. The stories portray characters of varying ages living across the world—a young woman coming of age on a reservation in Oregon, a South African boy who forms a rapport with an elephant—while examining human selfishness and finding gleaming moments of care and conviction, often prompted by an encounter with a nonhuman being. Humanness, Kim suggests, cannot be wrested from the natural world: when we lose the latter, we lose ourselves.
