Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

This biography provides a comprehensive account of Walt Disney's life from his boyhood in Marceline, Missouri and Kansas City to his death in Los Angeles. I thought it was especially good on his work. At least according to this book, Walt was often the guiding force behind novel ideas, but it really wasn't his skill as an animator that launched the Disney empire--it was his ability to see the cultural potential for animations. I particularly liked the accounts of Disney's collaborations with Leopold Stowkowski and Salvador Dali. The book also portrays Disney as restless: once he achieved something, his interest often turned to doing something new instead of simply repeating his success (which is not, of course, to say that his companies didn't often try to capitalize on and reproduce these successes!). I have read that the Disney family (and particuarly Diane Disney Miller) disagree with the author's characterization of Disney (especially in his relationship with his wife), but I thought the book made sense and gave a persuasive reading of Walt's life and its meaning in the midst of the American Century.

Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart

This book makes a passionate case for remembering and preserving the histories of exploitation and oppression hidden by the wealth created by sugar, a case localized and directed by a history tied to Barbados, and the Ashby family in particular (the author's family). With a combination of genealogical research, historical commonalities, and clear prose, the author makes unimaginable statistics vivid, real, and personal. The book focuses on three eras: that of the first known Ashby migrant to Barbados, that of the planter who solidified the family's holdings (on the brink of emancipation, as it turned out), and that of the family the author knew personally. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Americas.

Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination by Maria del Pilar Blanco

This monograph argues that we should be more attentive to the ways in which modernity haunts American literature; not with outright ghosts, but with two landscapes that uncannily exist simultaneously. Blanco makes a point of noting that her argument is not a generic one: often these hauntings transcend the genres of the gothic (in US literature) and the magically real (in Latin American literature). Blanco starts with a chapter on the hemispheric imaginary of haunting, before moving into three chapters that read specific scenarios: desert hauntings, urban hauntings, and transnational hauntings. She stakes a position as a close reader of texts (and thus, less interested in placing them in their historical contexts). The readings were not bad, but I found the theory of haunting more useful.

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian Baucom

This monograph creates an archive out of absence, specifically the absence of a response to Granville Sharp's letter to the Lords Commissioners protesting the court decision to treat the events on the Zong (that is, the captain's decision to throw 133 slaves overboard in order to conserve water supplies) as an insurance case rather than murder. Baucom looks at the way the Zong case has echoed through history (in politics, art, literature, and philosophy), how it reflects the growth of a system of finance capital that not only treats people as objects, but as objects whose loss can always already be theoretically present insofar as they can be insured, and how it shows us the intersections between a trans-Atlantic slave economy and modern systems of capital. The book is theoretical and dense. It draws connections between Benjamin's Arcades project and Arrighi's models of cycles in addition to drawing on theorists as diverse as Adam Smith and Slavoj Zizek. The contents of Granville Sharp's letter (and indeed, a straightforward account of the Zong case) are delayed and secondary to meditations on the ethical implications of how we understand history and of the connections between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and finance capitalism. While there are parts of the book that seemed opaque to me, its overall argument was eloquent and persuasive.

Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger

This collection of essays examines the role of the vampire in contemporary literature. Its essays are grouped into four categories: the development of the vampire metaphor in an historical continuum, on writing vampire fictions, the role of disease and disease metaphors in writing contemporary vampire fictions (especially AIDS), and the vampire as an other (especially related to sexuality). I found some of the essays in the collection stronger than others ("Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld" by Rob Latham on the ways in which the film The Lost Boys enacts the capitalist/vampire metaphor in our contemporary economy was particularly good), but all of the essays do better with reading a given text or set of texts than theorizing in new and exciting ways.

New American Gothic by Irving Malin

This book takes a psychoanalytic or Freudian approach to six American writers of the mid-twentieth century who produced gothic fictions: Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, James Purdy, and John Hawkes. Malin argues that these gothic fictions start with a narcissistic protagonist, disruptive to community. There are often family problems: self-absorbed parents and isolated children. Three typical gothic figures (the haunted castle, the voyage into the forest, and the reflection), which were "mere props" in British gothic, become more psychologically important--and show how these American gothic fictions reflect a community disrupted. This book could have been much more persuasive; it was organized thematically (chapters on the narcissistic self, the family, and the three images), rather than by author, and the argument felt rushed (although part of it may have been my lack of familiarity with many of the authors and titles discussed). I also felt the psychological approach was limiting--many times the analysis seemed forced or overdone.

Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader edited by Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin

This anthology collects short stories, excerpts of novels, and excerpts of autobiographical writing from what the editors describe as the rough south or grit lit genre. Indeed, the anthology shines in its generic formulation: the introduction and headnotes to each story help clarify what rough south means. In this case, it's contemporary (so Faulkner and O'Connor aren't here), it tends to be white and poor and created by outrageous autobiographical stories instead of academic training (although some of the later writers have participated in various MFA programs and other forms of higher education--and this experience raises ambivalent feelings in them), and it often features a kind of toughness or grit. I enjoyed the stories; some were better than others, but it was a fairly engaging collection all in all. Harry Crews's and Dorothy Allison's writings stand out as gems.

Umbrella by Will Self

This complicated novel uses modernist techniques (such as stream-of-consciousness narration, and three distinct narrative threads that intermingle and change with dizzying speed) in order to insist on the continued value of difficulty in reading and the continued difficulty of telling certain types of stories in more conventional ways. Fortunately for the reader, the book presents a brief précis of each time period (Audrey Death's early life to the end of World War I, her encounter with Dr. Zach Busner--who's willing to try new techniques for a certain class of patients--in a mental hospital in 1971, and Dr. Busner's reflections on his practice at that time from the vantage of his (almost contemporary with us) retirement. The book more than repaid its challenges. I particularly enjoyed the playful attention to Audrey's last name. I also thought the World War I story (with its familial betrayals) and the role Dr. Busner played in the treatment of the patients with encephalitis lethargica worked very well together to raise the questions of what we owe each other as human beings, and then to examine the consequences of failing to fulfill these duties. Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2012.

The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Colin Dayan

This book examines the ways that the law has been used to manipulate the boundaries of the human--especially in the case of enslaved persons and prisoners. Dayan posits that forms such as zombies, ghosts, and dogs appear in literature and culture in response to the ways that the law can be deployed to take away someone's humanity. The book covers a broad time period (dealing with cases in US law from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) and it combines sources and techniques from a variety of fields, including the law, history, and literature, to end in a stunning indictment of legal systems that take away people's humanity and an exposé of how the cruelest forms of punishment may be written off as administrative conveniences. All in all, a persuasive and useful monograph, and a model for a radical, engaged form of criticism.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

I really enjoyed this book, which is perhaps best described as creative non-fiction in the style of Tony Horwitz or Bill Bryson. It's about the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley--but it's also about the author's obsession with these assassinations and her travels to places relevant to them. Vowell has a vibrant personality with strong opinions she doesn't try to hide--which makes reading interesting, if, for example, you're not on the far left or of the opinion that Baltimore is a dangerous city you really wouldn't want to visit (except for the fact that John Wilkes Booth is buried there). The book also was a little uneven (the sections get progressively shorter, so there's more about Lincoln than Garfield, and more about Garfield than McKinley, and then a really short coda about Robert Todd Lincoln, who was on the scene at all three assassinations), but what I really felt was missing was an explanation: why stop with these three? While other assassinations were mentioned (John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X) it was only in passing--and if the book's about presidential assassinations, why rule out Kennedy? Obviously Kennedy's a big can of worms (and conspiracy theories)--but take a moment to say that! Overall, though, I found this book incredibly entertaining and informative: it's full neat facts and coincidences and it explores a potentially-overlooked corner of the American psyche.

American Photographs by Walker Evans

This volume reproduces the exhibit catalogue for Walker Evans's 1938 one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a descriptive essay by Lincoln Kirstein. The photographs are gorgeous and really display a lovely variety of American life and culture, from rural to urban (some of the pictures are repeated in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). The photographs are magnificent and the collection is well-worth looking into for anyone interested in American history or American photography.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

In this book Hannah Arendt looks at the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th Century as embodied by the two most prominent instances of it: Nazi Germany and the USSR under Stalin. Arendt traces this rise first through anti-Semitism, which began in the 19th Century, and then through imperialism to totalitarianism itself. This book is dense, comprehensive, and well argued. In addition to a lot of historical evidence, Arendt demonstrates why totalitarianism is so dangerous, and how the Nazis and Stalinist Russia used prison camps, secret police, propaganda, and conspiracy theories to dehumanize their populations.

Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell

This book is about people turning out to have mysterious pasts and to be almost unknown despite being a colleague or a family member. It's also about the long hand of history reaching out beyond expectation to address wrongs. I thought the mystery was pretty well handled--although the murderer is identified pretty quickly, there are a lot of layers of motivation and facts to untangle.

New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time by Thomas Bender

This book gives a comprehensive intellectual history of New York City. Bender contends that intellectual life in New York has always been different from Europe--so if we look for European structures, we'll be disappointed. Instead, he traces three types of intellectual involvement: civil, literary, and academic. He contends none of these structures has been completely successful in developing intellectual life, and that a city that could embrace all three would be ideal. In this book, Bender thinks a lot about the relations between intellectual life and democratic society, ultimately contending that intellectual life has to be open to all and a vibrant part of city culture for the optimal situation. I found this book very diligent in providing convincing evidence to support its arguments. The three trends are very clearly defined, but the book could trace their relationships to each other a little more clearly.

Intertextuality and the Literary Response to Terrorism in Ian McEwan's Saturday by Paul Pugliese

This thesis reads Ian McEwan's Saturday not just as a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but also a response to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. It investigates how we respond to terror in the modern world--and how the interpersonal and intrapersonal responses of Woolf and McEwan modulate that response.

The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe

This book was an enjoyable piece of historical fiction, with a speculative side. It starts as fairly straight historical fiction about a rich Boston family struggling to cope with the deaths of its mother and sister on the Titanic (a slightly implausible premise anyway because only four of the women in first class died; most made it to life boats). But as the story moves back towards the father's experiences shipping in China and forward to the other daughter's interests in spiritualism, it gradually becomes apparent that there's more going on than at first appeared. I found the twist disorienting, and while I liked the Salem connection (which seems, at least, to put this book in the same universe as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane), I think I would have liked a bit more payoff on the Titanic angle.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

This book in some ways picks up where Orientalism left off, but in other ways it is far more universal in its reach. Said contends that empires generally--and especially the British, French, and American empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--do not exist as merely political and economic formations, but must also be supported and reinforced by the culture of the metropole. Similarly, though, resistance to imperialism, as it arises, also bears a cultural mark. This book combines a great idea with compelling close readings ranging from Austen to Conrad to C.L.R. James and beyond. As I read, I realized that lots of my ideas about both empire and how we can use literature and other cultural productions to understand, reinforce, and contest empire, come from this monumental study. This study gives critics a standard to which to aspire both in its content and its style.

A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley

In this book the wonderful Flavia de Luce returns, but this time, while she does use her acute analytic skills and run some chemical experiments, poisons don't play a leading role. Instead, Flavia unravels a mystery that has a number of red herrings--and a fishy smell all around. I think this mystery did a great job bringing the disparate pieces of the story together in a convincing way, even if it took me longer than usual to figure out where things were headed. I'm really enjoying this series.

Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

This book looks at the development of vampires in popular culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. It contends that vampires change generationally and that they can help us track cultural preoccupations at a given moment. I found this book to be better written and more convincing than most academic accounts of vampires I've read recently.

The Inadvertent Epic: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots by Leslie A. Fiedler

This book contends that there's a female, domestic tradition in American literature that critics ignore or dismiss at their peril. Fiedler traces this tradition from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dixon's The Leopard's Spots and The Clansman (and Birth of a Nation) to Gone With the Wind (both the novel and the movie) and ending with Alex Haley's Roots. This book still seems representative of an older form of criticism (more observations than quotations and little direct engagement with a broader critical conversation). I appreciate Fiedler's attempts to reopen and redefine the literary canon, though I'm not sure he gets there with this book.