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Jaw-droppingly prescient for a novel written 25 years ago. "Hunting for scapegoats is always popular in times of serious trouble," notes Butler in an interview in the afterword of this edition. "So is hunting for the great leader who will restore prosperity and stability... He turns his true believers - his thugs - loose on those he chooses as scapegoats and he looks around for an external enemy to use as an even bigger scapegoat and a diversion from the reality that he doesn't really know what to do. Because of him, innocent people lose their freedom, lose custody of their children, lose their lives."

Another book recommended to me by @leahlove@mastodon.world. My own academic path was actually rather light on literary study, so I'm interested to see what insights I can discover in this book.

Learning my way around the #Fediverse by sharing this update from #Bookwrym. Hopefully this is an appropriate way to do this.

At the beginning of 2022, I set a goal to read at least 20 books this year that had been banned or threatened in Texas libraries or schools. My 20th book in that #FReadom journey was the 10th Anniversary edition of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. newjimcrow.com/

After finishing Alexander's profound work, I went back and reread her updated preface to the new edition, in which she captures the urgency of how the business of mass incarceration has evolved through privatized "e-carceration" and immigration detention.

Then I came across this deep dive by @aaronlmorrison published last month by AP, with personal stories of the impact of the drug war & mass incarceration. But I needed the context of Alexander's book to truly understand the massive scale of the whole story. apnews.com/article/war-on-drugs-75e61c224de3a394235df80de7d70b70

The Grief Keeper, a sharp work of YA speculative fiction by Alexandra Villasante, was the 19th book in my 2022 #FReadom quest to read books threatened or banned in Texas libraries and schools. The novel revolves around an experiment with some very serious ethics problems, and I found myself worrying that YA readers might think such behavior actually represented real clinical research. But the history of research ethics invites scutiny, and I believe Villasante trusts her YA readers to wrestle with the power dynamics and what they mean.