Best books…chosen by Rachel Slade

Rachel Slade is the author of Into the Raging Sea, a 2018 best-seller about the deadly demise of a container ship. Her new book, Making It in America, shadows the married founders of a sweatshirt firm to highlight the challenges of manufacturing in the U.

Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen (2020). I laughed, I cried, and learned maybe too much (for my own sanity) about the plodding, relentless, dogged effort of the rich and powerful to corner the market on every aspect of American life. Others have written about the subject, but Andersen’s puckish Spy magazine prose, combined with his erudition, make Evil Geniuses a master course in how to make wonk cool.

Work by James Suzman (2020). Everyone knows that Americans have an exceptionally unhealthy relationship to work—our status, our physical health, and our daily lives depend in great part on the kind of work we do and how much of our precious time on Earth we commit to doing it. Suzman’s delightful survey of human labor— “from the Stone Age to the age of robots,” as his subtitle has it—drives that fact home.

Craft by Glenn Adamson (2021). No one captures the complex history of American material culture more compellingly than Adamson. Craft connects the nation’s labor, production, and social history in a way that challenges us to consider who makes our things and how we are shaped by those makers. This is the unspoken inquiry that anchors all of my work.

Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly (2022). Subtitled “An Untold History of American Labor,” Kelly’s survey of lesser-known champions of American labor—women and people of color—conveys the breadth of the movement that supports working people in a country where capital has written the playbook in blood.

In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki (1933). This meditative essay by a Japanese philosopher turns incisive observation of the physical world—the play of shadows on lacquered objects, for example—into a heartbreaking allegory for what was lost when we rushed into the bright, shiny, mechanized world of modernity.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014). When Helen Macdonald’s father died unexpectedly in 2007, she found solace by training a northern goshawk. Macdonald is a virtuoso writer, and her beautiful, troubling, deeply honest memoir incisively captures our fractured relationship with the natural world.