22 books like Kara Walker

I love this because, in many ways, it is a kind of modern take on Sargasso Sea, with a liberal dash of Catcher in the Rye thrown into the soup: an exploration of what happens when you apply the same kinds of patriarchal oppression and expectations Antoinette suffered in the 19th century to a young 20th-century woman living in what is supposedly a more “progressive” and “modern” era.

Esther Greenwood’s unraveling is both brutally relatable and unexpectedly humorous at points, and there are images from it that are so starkly drawn that they stay embedded in your mind like glass shards after an explosion. It’s a modern classic for a reason. 

I find this book's range amazing. This slim but engrossing volume reveals new and invigorating ways of “reading” shadow images as the author discusses topics as diverse as food, cosmetics, architecture, jade, and even toilets.

Tanizaki also tackles the sociological differences in shadow interpretation across cultural divides, lamenting the loss of a more traditional interest in the ambiguous shadow as darkness gives way to a Westernization of Japanese culture that brings illumination in its wake.

While I didn’t always agree with his conclusions, they were always interesting, and got me thinking about why I look at shadows the way I do.

I have read this short section of Plato’s highly influential book, Republic, many times in many different settings over the course of my life and have always found it fresh and thought-provoking.

Are we just dupes staring at the secondhand shadows cast by figures on a wall, or will we escape our cave to find the truth in the light of the sun? Shadows have never been so denigrated! Nevertheless, I feel that Plato’s parable still has the power to make me question what it is I am doing with my life even if it was written over two thousand years ago.

I am a massive fan of David Foster Wallace, but I was skeptical when I first heard that his posthumous novel was set in something as banal as the Internal Revenue Service. But Wallace eased my concerns. Not only is the book engaging, but I was also surprised to find this work to be a novel of shadows.

The book is filled with thick descriptions of shadows moving eerily across rooms, halls, and buildings and perhaps even more disturbing, strange situations where brilliant lights cast no shadow. Reading the book, I wondered (or perhaps feared) that an excessive interest in shadows is a sign of the onset of mental collapse.

This is a classic, pioneering study of the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race—and how they shaped the South’s criminal justice system.  Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime, while at the same time adeptly linking the antebellum with the post-bellum criminal justice system. 

This extensive and prize-winning narrative of Southern women’s daily existence in the antebellum era covers all the bases on this subject. With the following chapter titles, how could it not? Southern Women, Southern Households; The View from the Big House; Between Big House and Slave Community; Gender Conventions; Women Who Opposed Slavery; And Women Who Did Not. A must-read for anyone wishing to delve into the subject of women’s lives in the antebellum south.

Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned adeptly analyzes the history of enslaved African Americans' relationship with the criminal courts of the Old Dominion from roughly 1700 to the end of the Civil War.  Based on over four thousand trials from the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods, no other book does such a comprehensive job of analyzing the prevalence, longevity, and variety of behavior attributed to slave convicts. This book also provides a detailed picture of how one slave society evolved, and along the way, it uncovers previously unexamined aspects of slave culture, and of slave owners' attitudes toward the "domestic enemy" in their midst.  Schwarz argues that the judicial system for slaves served two purposes: it helped slave owners control slaves and enabled authorities to sanction criminal behavior. This dual function of slave trials mirrored the two kinds of slaves' behavior judges tried to suppress.

When focused on slave… show more.

When I begin researching a new historical subject I usually turn first to children’s books for a quick, broad overview. For Southern USA plantation life, Kalman’s book, part of the Historic Communities series, is a perfect introduction to the subject of southern plantations, with splendidly detailed drawings of homes and outbuildings, a glossary of terms, and many photographs from the latter decades before emancipation. Its focus is split between the planters’ lives and the lives of those they enslaved, introducing readers to every facet of this setting and the challenges faced by those who lived there. A great springboard into the subject for homeschooling.

In this comprehensive study of homicide in America, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. The book is particularly strong in addressing the South’s penchant for violence. In readable fashion, Roth argues that the United States, especially the South, is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults―friends, acquaintances, and strangers.  Roth notes that the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge―and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate―correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith… show more.

When I first read this book, I could not put it down. Taylor is a beautiful storyteller, and it’s no surprise that her book was a finalist for the LA Times book award.

Taylor teaches readers that during slavery sometimes revenge was justice or the closest thing to it. Story after story, we are introduced to women who suffered terribly at the hands of their enslaver. But in each case, women fought back, plotted, and sought revenge against their perpetrators.

What I appreciated about the book is that it pushes back against the idea that Black women were passive or even nonviolent. This book gives us a portrait into the personal relationships that ended in bloodshed because of the violence of slavery.