Books you should read in June, including How To Raise An Antiracist, the new David Sedaris, and Daddy Issues
Also check out By Her Own Design, Lapvona, and I'd Like To Play Alone, Please, and more
Aux News Sedaris
(Clockwise from bottom-left): Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company); How To Raise An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (One World); For The Throne by Hannah Whitten (Orbit); Lapvona: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press); Bitch: On The Female Of The Species by Lucy Cooke (Basic Books); Nora Ephron: A Novel by Kristin Marguerite Doidge (Chicago Review Press); I’d Like To Play Alone, Please by Tom Segura (Grand Central Publishing); Blood Orange Night: My Journey To The Edge Of Madness by Melissa Bond (Gallery Books)
Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. To help you navigate the wave of titles coming to shelves this June, The A.V. Club has narrowed down the options to 10 of the books we’re most excited about.
14 Comments
Yeah, but what if I’m not a painfully white Californian woman?
Then I guess you should just move along.
I’m painfully white, and have found that the California sun really contributes to the painfulness. Happier living in the Northeast!
Then it’s James Ellroy time.
I love this list, I can feel how intensely HR it is.
“Charles Darwin’s fundamentally flawed theory of evolution”Fundamentally flawed? I can imagine there being passages in his works that are sexist or even misogynist, but I don’t believe you can say it is fundamentally flawed.
I wonder if Darwins contemporaries considered him Woke 150 years ago…
They did! And they tried to cancel him while also whining that they were the ones being cancelled, despite being the dominant culture. Good thing society has evolved so much in the past 150 years!
Claiming oppression has been a tool of oppressors for centuries, maybe millennia. It’s really effective for some reason.
Charles Darwin’s fundamentally flawed theory of evolution
I wasn’t expecting AVC to be anti-Darwinism. Young or Old Earth creationist?
Omphalos Hypothesis, actually.
Kendi summarized on Twitter: “More than a third of White students lied about their race on college applications, and about half of these applicants lied about being Native American. More than three-fourths of these students who lied about their race were accepted.”Yeah, he deleted that tweet because it didn’t further the B.S. he peddles. Dude is a racist, I know half a dozen individuals that attended his classes at UF, his classes were an indoctrination in white hate. But go ahead Alison, keep carrying water for racists.
It’s weird that he’s gotten so popular while nobody seems to grapple with the actual implications of his ideas:https://www.slowboring.com/p/racism-kendi?s=w
“Charles Darwin’s fundamentally flawed theory of evolution” Okay so I need more information on this one. How, exactly, is it fundamentally flawed?
I expect the author wants you to buy the book. But fortunately there were longer reviews that suggest the answer:“ According to Darwinian dogma, male animals fight one another for possession of females, “perform strange tactics” and mate promiscuously, propelled by a biological imperative to spread their abundant seed. Females are monogamous and passive; they wait patiently for their large, energy-rich eggs to be fertilised by cheap and tiny sperm, then selflessly give their all to their offspring.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/11/bitch-by-lucy-cooke-review-joyous-debunking-gender-stereotypes-nature-wild-darwin-femaleAgain, this might be a flattening of what the book actually says, but I’d take issue with that assumption. Darwin was drawing inferences from a comparatively limited set of animal species. The animal kingdom is delightfully varied and weird, but I also don’t think Darwin was so bold as to say that his observations were universal. At least in the original Origin of the Species edition, he’s pretty open about admitting a lack of definitive knowledge. I don’t think it makes any sense to criticize him for not factoring in the behavior of some female-dominated species of antelope or whatever when that antelope has only been studied in the last few decades.Was he sexist? Sure, what person from 170+ years ago wasn’t to a modern lens? Does that invalidate his contributions? I don’t really think so. I imagine the book’s message that different animals have different approaches to sex might surprise someone out there and be valuable, but in order to get people to buy the book I’m sure they’re exaggerating stuff a bit. It’s hard to sell a book without some flashy pronouncements.