Abstract
A brief reflection of the past five years as Book Review Editor of Contexts and a list of books that spark editorial team members’ sociological imaginations.
Keywords
Imagination, intrigue, and joy exist in a wide variety of books for readers. This was readily apparent during my time as the Book Review Editor for Contexts over the past five years. The reviews we published highlight how people connect to one another across ideas and research, envisioning how society works and what interventions and policies may shape lives. These reviews also showed how different areas of research and genres of books continue to spark reviewers’ sociological imaginations.
To be honest, I was not sure how successful I would be in this position. Book reviews are important publications and serve our field to expose scholars to new research, summarize the importance of studies for policymaking, and give voice to those who have been silenced, among many other impacts of these short-form writings. Yet, some scholars in academia eschew these writings as nearly valueless to careers, as if only certain forms of writing count as contributions to knowledge. As I recruited reviewers for my earliest issues, some colleagues voiced similar concerns that their writings would not be valued by their colleagues. Moreover, people are stretched thin with many commitments, and the COVID-19 pandemic only made doing work even more challenging as people navigated the continued uncertainty that befell their families and communities. Reviewers, however, kept writing and seeing their reviews as important for supporting the vision of how they could bolster sociology’s contributions to ongoing conversations across many experiences, issues, and topics.
Reviews covered a wide range of interests, including food culture, drugs and medicine, immigration, gender and sexuality, music, religion, law and criminal justice, politics, race and racism, education, and marriage and families. These interests were also covered by scholars in different positions around academia, working in public and private institutions of all missions.
Reflecting a desire for our book reviews to be a space for newer scholars to develop their engagement in sociological conversations and fine-tune their writing, a third of reviewers the last five years were graduate students. Unfortunately, not everyone who showed interests in writing reviews for Contexts fit into the pages as we steadily gained interest as the years moved forward, arguably a testament to people seeing the space provided by the magazine as an important forum to be a part of. More opportunities to review will be available as the new editorial team takes leadership of Contexts in the coming months, and I would like to encourage people to be sure and reach out to explore those possibilities. On behalf of Rashawn and Fabio, I want to thank each of the scholars who took the time to write reviews of excellent books featured in the pages of Contexts. Your attention to not only providing accessible summaries of these books, but situating them within how sociology continues to evolve and matter for understanding the social world has been illuminating. Further, my success as Book Review Editor is a result of your passions and efforts to push the field forward. I could not have done this without you. Lastly, I want to thank Rashawn and Fabio for entrusting me with this position and giving me the freedom to craft this section of Contexts.
To wrap up my time as Book Review Editor, I felt it would be nice to share with readers what books the Contexts editorial team have recently turned to for inspiration. Specifically, I asked what five books published over the last few years catalyzed their sociological imaginations. Below is the list of books compiled from several of our editorial team members: Michael Bader (mb), Carson Byrd (cb), Alisha Kirchoff (ak), Rashawn Ray (rr), Fabio Rojas (fr), and Sean Vilna (sv). As is evident from the list, we find the innovation, intrigue, and joy that pique our sociological imagination from a wide variety of books. Perhaps some of these books will spark ideas for your courses, research, or everyday conversations and observations.
Happy reading!
Anderson, Carol. 2021. The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Baldwin, Davarian L. 2021. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities. New York, NY: Bold Type Books.
Barton, Bernadette. 2021. The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Bell-Scott, Patricia. 2016. The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Boyles, Andrea S. 2019. You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Byrd, W. Carson. 2021. Behind the Diversity Numbers: Achieving Racial Equity on Campus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Caplan, Bryan, and Zach Weinersmith. 2019. Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. New York, NY: First Second.
Carlile, Brandi. 2021. Broken Horses: A Memoir. New York, NY: Crown.
Clair, Matthew. 2020. Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Coates, Laura. 2022. Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
D’Ignazio, Catherine and Lauren F. Klein. 2020. Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dolmage, Jay T. 2017. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Eban, Katherine. 2019. Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Frankel, Glenn. 2021. Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Grann, David. 2017. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Hill, Fiona. 2021. There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
Johnson, Matthew. 2020. Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Keefe, Patrick Radden. 2019. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. New York, NY: Anchor Books.
Kendall, Mikki. 2021. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that the Movement Forgot. New York, NY: Penguin.
Lee, Min Jin. 2017. Pachinko. New York, NY: Grand Central.
Littlejohn, Krystale E. 2021. Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
MacGillis, Alec. 2021. Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Palmer, Ada. 2016-2021. Terra Ignota Series: Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, Perhaps the Stars. New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates.
Pollan, Michael. 2018. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. New York, NY: Penguin.
Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. 2021. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. New York, NY: Bold Type Books.
Rauch, Jonathan. 2021. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste. 2019. Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wilde, Melissa. 2019. Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Willett, Cynthia, and Julie Willett. 2019. Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.
Yaffa, Josha. 2021. Between Two Fires: Trust, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia. New York, NY: Crown.