94 books like Teardown

This book reminds us that in addition to shaping our laws, our institutions, and our culture, white supremacy has also shaped our nation’s landscape, from housing discrimination and redlining to blockbusting and urban renewal.

Although Brown focuses on racial segregation and Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, his insights speak to communities of color throughout the United States and how decades of hypersegregation in American cities have adversely impacted health, livelihoods, and lives.

What makes Brown’s analysis of the landscape of urban apartheid so compelling, however, is his recipe for dismantling it and replacing it with a new landscape of racial equity. 

For several years, I’ve been teaching a course called the American Way of Death, and Sara Jensen Carr’s The Topography of Wellness features prominently on my syllabus.

Carr explores how soaring mortality rates in the nineteenth century, mostly from diseases like cholera and tuberculosis, prompted an army of public health reformers, urban planners, and municipal leaders to tackle the toxic urban landscape by envisioning and creating a new landscape with the kinds of infrastructure that today we take for granted. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new and improved city, with its public water and sewer systems and public parks, was benefiting both rich and poor alike.

Carr is quick to point out, of course, that scientific and political notions of health and wellness continue to shape our nation’s landscape, with mixed outcomes, mostly as a result of systemic inequities and unequal access to the kinds of urban… show more.

I’m old enough to remember T.W. Rogers, the downtown department store that was still hanging on in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s before finally succumbing to the same market and political forces that doomed so many similar enterprises during the postwar exodus of retail from the downtown to the suburbs.

This book pays tribute to the grand palaces of consumption, both large and small, that emerged in virtually every American city and town during the first half of the twentieth century. I was especially pleased that Howard chose to focus not only on the large urban retailers found in big cities but also on smaller establishments, similar to the one that I can still recall from my childhood.

Naturally, the younger generation today knows the department store as the anchor store at the mall, and once again, as happened more than half a century ago, it is under threat… show more.

For the better part of a decade, I traveled back and forth between my home in Boston and a small hobby farm on Block Island, Rhode Island. During my time there, I met a handful of legacy farmers, most of them land-rich and cash poor, struggling with how to hold on to parcels of land that had been in their families for generations, a theme that is central to Clearing Land. This surely resonates with small and mid-sized farmers throughout the United States trying to remain viable in a landscape dominated by Big Ag and increasingly impacted by climate change.

Of course, unlike the prickly old Yankees that continue to make a go of farming on Block Island and other parts of New England, the New England farming family to which Brox belongs are Levantine, a reminder that immigrant families have long had a hand in shaping—and continue to… show more.

Detroit is a city shaped by social movements. Even in the city’s darkest times of violent uprisings, outmigration, and bankruptcy, ordinary Detroiters remained committed to transformative change - banding together to challenge issues of racial injustice, housing access, food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and accountable governance. A People’s Atlas of Detroit is community-based scholar-activism at its best.

The brilliantly illustrated collection of maps, essays, photographs, poetry, and interviews is the outcome of a multi-year project involving over fifty residents from all walks of life who are at the forefront of local social justice initiatives. Through its combination of radical cartography, historical perspectives, and firsthand reflections, A People’s Atlas elevates the voices of the underrecognized people who are actively charting courses for a more equitable urban future. 

A great story about the dark side of trying to do the right thing:

A radical, anti-Vietnam War protestor is involved in an incident where someone is inadvertently killed and is forced to go underground, where she builds a new identity and law-abiding life. Thirty years later she is recognized by a former classmate and, facing a long-delayed jail sentence, must find a way to explain it all to her family, friends, and above all, her daughter.

This list could be full of Toni Morrison novels and be no worse for it.

I’d argue that the late writer is the finest we’ve ever had on the topics of grief, loss, and ancestry—especially from the Black American perspective. One of my favorite examples is Song of Solomon, a mesmerizing journey through what it takes to craft an identity in the midst of racism and the ruptures it creates in our lives.

Morrison's singular prose is pure magic as it weaves a tale of the enduring power of love. A literary masterpiece.

This book had me laughing from the first page. I could see the town immediately and hear every character’s voice clearly in my head. I found it incredibly easy to read. Before I knew it, I was halfway through the story and I loved Jane, Duncan and Jimmy as though they were members of my own family.

Because this book is so funny, I found that the sad, serious parts affected me deeply. But ultimately, I found it hugely uplifting. It reminded me that the worst events can bring out the best in me and the people I love. I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t love this book. 

“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

Thus begins Marlena, Julie Buntin’s debut novel about Marlena and Cat, who meet as fifteen-year-olds in rural Michigan. Their friendship is intense and complicated, and right from the start, we know that Cat is the only one who makes it out alive.

Buntin’s writing perfectly captures the voice and texture of adolescence, and her book is a model for how to maintain tension in a story when you find out early on (page 6 to be exact) that one of the main characters is dead.

The sections featuring Cat as an adult show that while she may have left her small town behind, she can’t escape her past. 

All Fudged Up features one of the most charming real-life settings I’ve come across in cozy mysteries.

The series takes place on the delightful Mackinac Island, where there are horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and plenty of historic buildings like the McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shop.

The main character, Allie McMurphy, spends her days whipping up batches of fudge, keeping the hotel running, and solving murders whenever her sweet puppy finds a body.