Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

This book portrays the extreme poverty of the Lester family in a story that might be compared to a train wreck: you know you shouldn't be looking (and in this case laughing), but you can't look away either. The book relies neither on sentimentality nor on a proletarian call to action, but rather by turning the readers' reactions back on them: instead of a moral or a plan, Caldwell interrogates why we respond to this family with humor, contempt, and perhaps pity. The failure of the land to produce crops is equated with the family's inability to reproduce within social norms (the Lesters have had seventeen children, but only two still live at home, for example, and the ones who have left want nothing to do with the family). While Jeeter Lester (the head of the family) instinctively knows that his fate is tied to the land and that he wants no part of industrialization (symbolized by the possibility of a mill job in Augusta), the family is completely unable to cope with modernity: they treat their new car as if it were almost human--and in so doing manage to almost destroy it in a few short days. Finally, this book is about rural poverty in the South in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales--certainly it's a relevant topic, but Tobacco Road raises bigger and more pressing questions: What does it mean to be human? and What are the costs of living in a society that allows some of its members to become so abject?

Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexican Border by Rachel C. St. John

This book gives a concise, yet informative history of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, especially between El Paso and the Pacific Ocean. In so doing, it shows how different people and governments use the border--not just to control immigration, but also to, at times, challenge state sovereignty, collect revenue, avoid customs duties, gain a military advantage, and police morality. Indeed, the idea of fencing the border came late. In the conclusion, St. John lays out her cards: she believes that the border fence is not the best solution to the challenges of illegal immigration, and that the U.S. and Mexico should work together, along with the transnational community, to come up with a more flexible method of policing the border. I also learned more than I ever knew about the Mexican Revolution. A well-written and thought-provoking book.

Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown

This book recreates the complicated story of Arthur Mervyn, a young man from the country who comes to Philadelphia and immediately finds himself embroiled in its corruption--first commercial and then physical. I am particularly interested in the ways that Haiti simmers below the surface of this novel. While the plot is hard to follow at first, by untwisting it the reader discovers the full extent to which the slave trade supports enterprise in early America.

William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words by Richard Godden

This book contends that Faulkner's prose reflects the trauma of the South after World War II: as its old forms of labor changed (and African Americans migrated north in increasing numbers) white Southerners came to realize that their identity depended on African American identity. Godden gives excellent close readings, although his argument is a bit more radical (and tenuous) than I would like.

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz

This book presents a history of sugar. While in some ways I found it to be somewhat Anglo-centric, it was a really fascinating account of the rise of sugar as a form of food. It's Mintz's contention that sugar and the patterns of consumption that surround it are not accidental or arbitrary, but instead the result of larger economic patterns. I found the production and eating and being chapters particularly helpful--Mintz talks about the way that sugar's chemical properties (especially in preserving food) and its historical circumstances have changed the way we eat--and thus the way that we relate to each other. This book is really remarkable.