Current Issues, Mar. 2024, Pt. 2 | Prepub Alert

Books of the times. 

Bucks, Garrett. The Right Kind of White: A Memoir. S. & S. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781982197209. $28.99. MEMOIR

Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Farrar. Mar. 2024. 320p. ISBN 9780374608224. $30. Downloadable. SOCIAL SCIENCE/GENDER STUDIES

Heilbrunn, Jacob. America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators. Liveright: Norton. Mar. 2024. 272p. ISBN 9781324094661. $28.99. POLITICAL SCIENCE

Hunt-Hendrix, Leah & Astra Taylor. Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Pantheon. Mar. 2024. 432p. ISBN 9780593701249. $30. POLITICAL SCIENCE

Sciutto, Jim. The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War. Dutton. Mar. 2024. 320p. ISBN 9780593474136. $30. POLITICAL SCIENCE

Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel, ed. Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. Norton. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781324074397. $28.99. POLITICAL SCIENCE

Troiano, Nick. The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes. S. & S. Mar. 2024. 352p. ISBN 9781668028254. $30. POLITICAL SCIENCE

Founder of the Barnraisers Project, which works to organize majority-white communities for racial and social justice, Bucks looks at his own life to find an expansive definition of whiteness not based on exclusion in The Right Kind of White. An influential and sometimes controversial philosopher and gender theorist, Butler goes mainstream by asking Who’s Afraid of Gender? and responding that anti-gender sentiment is at the core of right-wing movements (75,000-copy first printing). Puzzling though the America Last bias of many U.S. right-wingers, with their support (for instance) of Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán, National Interesteditor Heilbrunn points out that since World War I this slice of U.S. society has often been enamored of authoritarians abroad, from Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler to Pinochet. Founder of Solidaire, a national network of philanthropists dedicated to funding progressive movements, oil heiress Hunt-Hendrix (recently profiled in The New Yorker) joins with documentarian and Debt Collective cofounder Taylor to examine the concept of Solidarity throughout history as a means of crossing class, race, and national borders. CNN anchor and chief national security correspondent Sciutto argues that after the post–Cold War quiet we’re experiencing a “1939 moment” defined by The Return of Great Powers and their fierce jockeying for dominance. To answer the question Did It Happen Here?—that is, did fascism enter the U.S. mainstream with the 2016 election?—Wesleyan professor Steinmetz-Jenkins organizes crucial readings on the subject from classics by Hannah Arendt and Angela Davis to contemporary commentary by the likes of Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Pankaj Mishra. Founding executive director of Unite America, Troiano asserts in The Primary Solution that the underlying cause of today’s political dysfunction is the U.S. primary system.

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Barbara Hoffert

Barbara Hoffert (bhoffert@mediasourceinc.com, @BarbaraHoffert on Twitter) is Editor, LJ Prepub Alert; winner of ALA's Louis Shores Award for reviewing; and past president, awards chair, and treasurer of the National Book Critics Circle, which awarded her its inaugural Service Award in 2023.

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