Pleased to report the hiking group I joined early this year includes several serious readers. Because this group has about the same number of men and women, the recommendations being made to me are a nice balance of non-fiction vs. novels. Sweet.
Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past (2022) is the most recent winner recommended to me by one of my fellow hikers. The twenty essays in this excellent volume each skillfully de-construct a persistent myth held dear by many Americans. Every essay selected by editors Kevin M. Kruze and Julian E. Zelizer is solidly written and strongly supported via the extensive footnotes citing formidable secondary sources. Although there's not a weak piece here, for me The Magic of the Marketplace - tracing the long history of the canard that unregulated capitalism is the answer to society's ills - was among the most compelling and persuasive. I was not at all surprised to learn that the authors of that essay - Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway - are also the authors of Merchants of Doubt, the source material for the remarkable 2014 documentary of the same name.
https://reflectionsfromthebellcurve.blogspot.com/2016/02/merchants-of-doubt.html
Kathleen Belew's contribution to the book - Insurrection - centering on the "leaderless resistance" model being used by white supremacists and other domestic terrorists, is, by a wide margin, the scariest piece, and Voter Fraud by Carol Anderson the most sobering. End-to-end, The United States Is An Empire (Daniel Immerwahr) was perhaps the most educational. That one sent me on a search to discover more about five "proposed" States that the U.S. Congress "...swatted down...", including Deseret, Lincoln, Montezuma, Sequoyah, and West Dakota.
Based on Myth America and other winners recommended to me by one hiking friend, I'm mulling over whether to offer that person an opportunity to apply for membership in my reading posse. I'm now working on a rubric to share with him to ensure he knows what is expected should he want to be considered for that august group; he would be the first man ever so honored. Stay tuned for further news. In the meanwhile, try picking up Myth America. No need to read it cover-to-cover; just scan the table of contents, read the pieces that interest you, and then tell me your impressions.
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