86 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. 

Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable that LeDuff is a tremendously charismatic writer. A Pulitzer Prize winner, a breathtaking reporter, and a denizen of Detroit for decades, this is one of the most compellingly written books on Detroit ever.

This book has a Mustang eight-cylinder engine on it, and I hoovered this up over just a couple of hours. If you want a barn-burning page-turner of a tale, showcasing Detroit as its most broken and beautiful, this is the one for you.

I’d normally abstain from the pompous sin of quoting one’s own fiction, but I’m doing it here only to contextualize this recommendation.

“Adolescence is an exercise in coveting what exists just beyond our grasp,” my book’s narrator tells us in his preamble to his telling of Foster’s story. “It is this inaccessibility that sustains its magic.” To be fifteen is to be a voyeur looking wistfully in on the poignancy of others’ lives: this is the idea I tried to operationalize through the narrator’s project, with full knowledge that I’d never do it as lyrically as The Virgin Suicides. 

Nominally, the main characters of Eugenides’ debut are the five titular Lisbon sisters, who successively take their own lives, but we encounter them chiefly as figments of a collective imagination: in the captivated minds of a faceless group of teenage boys who witness the tragedies from afar.

As a sort of… show more.

I adore this book as it feels deeply woven with the legacy of Octavia Butler: gripping, socially engaged science fiction that is full of brilliant information about how to survive societal collapse.

I appreciate how adrienne shines a light on grief as it relates to the various social conditions that create hardship for folks. This systemic lack of care makes it hard for many folks to have their needs met in life, let alone have a dignified death. I gobbled this book up and was very sad to have finished it.  

The most common kind of book club in America is a Bible study. And while lots and lots of people have opinions about how you should read the Bible, or who is doing it wrong, no one delves into how real readers read the sacred text like James Bielo.

An ethnographer who is interested in American religion, Bielo is a careful and kind observer, who does everything he can to understand what people are doing when they read the Bible together. He takes you with him and you’ll see the world differently because he did.

This book blasted a crater in my chest when I read it last year. A complete surprise, as who among us has heard of the Copper Country Strike of 1913-14? Yet it was the first unionized strike in the region, and had a complicated effect on Michigan, the mining industry, and the lives of those who stood up to the rich mine owners. This book gives us such intimate details of the cost of standing up for one’s dignity and safe working conditions that it felt as important as today’s news. From the woman at the heart of the novel to the network of labor unions she pulled together, to the tragedies experienced by this small town, I loved it and cherished the inspiration for today’s fights.