Thursday, December 28, 2017

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2017


Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2017.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor
Message To Our Folks:  The Art Ensemble of Chicago
by Paul Steinbeck
University of Chicago Press,  2017

Epistrophes:  Jazz and the Literary Imagination
by Brent Hayes Edwards
Harvard Universary Press,  2017

We Were Eight Years In Power:  An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 2017

Democracy in Chains:  The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America
by Nancy MacLean
Viking, 2017
The Fifty-Year Rebellion:  How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
by Scott Kurashige
University of California Press,  2017

Queen of Bebop:  The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
by Elaine M. Hayes
Ecco Press,  2017
A Colony In A Nation
by Chris Hayes
W.W. Norton & Company,  2017
The Color of Law:  A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Liveright Publishing Corporation (A Division of W.W. Norton & Company),  2017
Chester B. Himes:  A Biography
by Lawrence P. Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company
Class, Race, and Marxism
by David Roediger
Verso,  2017

Hitler’s American Model:  The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
by James Q. Whitman
Princeton University Press,  2017
Futures of Black Radicalism
Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin
Verso,  2017
The Dawn of Detroit:  A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom In The City Of The Straits
by Tiya Miles
The New Press,  2017
Devil’s Bargain:  Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Penguin Press,  2017

Invisible No More:  Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
by Andrea J. Ritchie
Beacon Press,  2017
Policing the Black Man
Edited by Angela J. Davis
Pantheon Books,  2017
NO Is Not Enough:  Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics And Winning The World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Haymarket Books,  2017
HONORABLE MENTIONS
How To Kill A City:  Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight For The Neighborhood
by Peter Moskowitz
Nation Books,  2017