Monday, December 23, 2024

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2024

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 2024.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor  

The Black AntiFascist Tradition:
Fighting Black From Anti-Lynching To Abolition
by Jeanelle K. Hope & Bill V. Mullen
Haymarket Books, 2024

 

Ella Baker And The Black Freedom Movement:
A Radical Democratic Vision
by Barbara Ransby
The University of North Carolina Press, 2024
(Second Edition)

 


Deluge:
Gaza and Israel From Crisis To Cataclysm
Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner
OR Books, 2024 

We Charge Genocide:
American Fascism and the Rule of Law
by Bill V. Mullen
Fordham University Press, 2024
 

 
The Myth of American Idealism:
How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World
by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson
Penguin Press, 2024
 

The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 2024

Living Space: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Free Jazz, From Analog To Digital
by Michael E. Veal
Wesleyan University Press, 2024

The Rebel's Clinic:
The Revolutionary Lives Of Frantz Fanon
by Adam Shatz
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024
Dis// Integration:
2 Novellas, & 3 Stories & A Little Play
by William Melvin Kelley
Vintage Books, 2024
 
Defectors: The Rise Of the Latino Far Right
And What It Means For America
by Paola Ramos
Pantheon Books, 2024
 
Claudia Jones:
Visions Of A Socialist America
by Denise Lynn
Polity, 2024
 

Building the Black City:
The Transformation Of American Life
by Joe William Trotter, Jr.
University of California Press, 2024
Erasing History:
How Fascists Rewrite The Past
To Control the Future
by Jason Stanley
Atria, 2024

 

James: A Novel
by Percival Everett
Doubleday, 2024
 
The United States Governed
by Six Hundred Thousand Despots
by John Swanson Jacobs
(Edited by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder)
The University of Chicago Press, 2024
 
Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing
by Nigel C. Gibson
Polity, 2024
You Can't Please All: Memoirs, 1980-2024
by Tariq Ali
Verso, 2024

  
The Killing of Gaza: Reports On A Catastrophe
by Gideon Levy
Verso, 2024


Rooted:
The American Legacy of Land Theft And the Modern Movement For Black Land Ownership
by Brea Baker

One World,  2024


Darkening Blackness: Race, Gender, Class,
and Pessimism in 21st Century Black Thought
by Norman Ajari
Polity, 2024
 
HONORABLE MENTIONS: 
I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader
by Gerald Horne
Edited by Tionne Alliyah Parris
OR Books, 2024
 
 
Metaracism:
How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives
And How We Break Free
by Tricia Rose
Basic Books, 2024
 
 
We Are The Leaders We Have Been Looking For:
The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures
by Eddie Glaude, Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2024
 
 
Illiberal America: A History
by Steven Hahn
W.W. Norton and Company, 2024
 
Yale and Slavery: A History
by David W. Blight
Yale University Press, 2024

The Unseen Truth:
When Race Changed Sight in America
by Sarah Lewis
Harvard University Press, 2024
 
We Refuse:
A Forceful History of Black Resistance
by Kellie Carter Jackson
Seal Press, 2024
 
Towers Of Ivory and Steel:
How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
by Maya Wind
Verso, 2024
 
Medgar & Myrlie:
Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America
by Joy-Ann Reid
Mariner Books, 2024
 
Madness: Race and Insanity in A Jim Crow Asylum
by Antonia Hylton
Legacy Lit, 2024
The Racket:
A Rogue Reporter vs. The American Empire
by Matt Kennard
(Second Edition)
Bloomsbury Academic, 2024


The White Bonus:
Five Families and the Cash Value Of Racism in America
by Tracie McMillan
Henry Holt and Company, 2024
  
Remember, You Are A Wiley: A Memoir
by Maya Wiley
Grand Central Publishing, 2024
 
Salvage: Readings From The Wreck
by Dionne Brand
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024

Any Day Now: Toward A Black Aesthetic
by Larry Neal
David Zwirner Books, 2024


 

NOTE: THE PANOPTICON REVIEW HAS THUS FAR PRESENTED TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS ANNUALLY FROM 2010-2024

PLEASE CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUAL LINKS TO ACCESS THE LISTINGS OF EACH CALENDAR YEAR: