20 Required Readings: Katha Pollitt

Image: George Riemann

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


[Katha Pollitt and John Judis have written extensively about the American political climate during Mother Jones‘ first two decades, so we asked them to identify the 10 most important political books since 1976. They did, with a few qualifiers: “My list is about as arbitrary and personal as Top 10 lists usually are,” Pollitt says, while Judis admits, “These are the 10 books written in the last two decades that have most influenced how I understand the world. I don’t claim they are the 10 best or 10 most representative.” See if you agree. If not, e-mail your own picks to backtalk@motherjones.com.]

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation magazine and author of Reasonable Creatures: Feminism & Society in American Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1994). In the early 1980s, she reviewed books for Mother Jones. Her choices, listed chronologically:

1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture & Society, by Raymond Williams (London: Oxford University Press). The great Marxist scholar of English literature analyzes the history of 131 crucial words, from “aesthetic,” which has always meant the opposite of “social” and “practical,” to “work,” which did not always mean paid employment.

1978 For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (New York: Doubleday). This feminist classic is still the most elegant and spirited dissection of received medical wisdom — a.k.a. sexism.

1983 Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson (London: Verso). A brilliant and erudite investigation of the concept of national identity — a modern invention whose psychological power lies in denying that it is one.

1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, by Pierre Bourdieu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). With subtlety and sophistication, the great French sociologist analyzes the way social and economic classes are shaped and preserved by myriad tiny but amazingly precise differences — from preferences in food and art to body language and hairstyles. The data are French, the implications universal.

1984 Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, by R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin (New York: Pantheon). Three prominent scientists debunk genetic determinism and sociobiology so thoroughly it’s amazing The Bell Curve got published.

1988 A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A beautiful, furious essay about the author’s native Antigua, tourist mecca and postcolonial slum — the modern world in a nutshell.

1990 City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, by Mike Davis (London: Verso). I learned something from every page of this bold social history of Los Angeles as the prototype of a new kind of city, the world megalopolis.

1991 Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, by Susan Faludi (New York: Crown). The book that woke American women from their Reagan-era “post-feminist” nap. Faludi shows how the media operates as a kind of Möbius strip, endlessly recycling half-truths and distortions to “prove” that feminism has made women miserable.

1991 Mao II, by Don DeLillo (New York: Penguin). A Pynchon-like writer leaves his study to explore a world of cults, terrorists, dilapidation, and drift. A tragic meditation on post-modernity as alternating currents of isolation and mass hysteria.

Adolph Reed Jr.’s essays are not collected in a book, but he is the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender. (His writing appears in the Progressive and Village Voice.)

What books would you choose for your 1976-96 political syllabus? E-mail your suggestions to backtalk@motherjones.com.

John Judis’ required readings

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate