Weekly Non-Fiction Reading List 1.29.24
This week, we have 3 books on the list. We have an incredible book about a Jim Crow asylum and the history of racism and mental illness. Then, we have a book by a Nobel Prize winner and one about Americans who live on $2 a day.
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Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality by Angus Deaton
Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and typically economics is the most boring subject on Earth, but he wrote another amazing book. I originally learned of Angus Deaton when reading his previous book Deaths of Despair, which discusses how the widening wealth gap and disappearing middle class is the leading cause of overdose deaths, suicides, and deaths from alcoholism.
In this book Angus discusses more topics around how our current system of capitalism is failing millions of Americans, but he puts a lot of blame on himself and fellow economists. You learn about why people become economists, but how it turns into something else that ends up leading to ruining public policy. Deatin provides a ton of great commentary on our healthcare system, education system, and many other policies that are keeping people from fulfilling the American Dream.
$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn Edin
Did you know millions of Americans are living on $2 a day? This book enlightened me to that fact, and this was written in 2015, and things have only gotten worse. Kathryn Edin writes about households that live off of $2 per person per day, and it’s brutal. She interviews many different people, and I think it takes books like this to really get people to understand what’s going on.
One of the biggest myths that this book helps bust is the idea that people without wealth are just lazy or don’t want to work. Many of the people the author interviews are some of the most hard-working people you’ll hear about. Not only that, but Edin dives into the interpersonal issues these people have like being abandoned, abused, assaulted, and traumatized as children and just never having an opportunity to get help or get ahead.
People really need to read books like this to get first-hand accounts of what it’s like for these people who are struggling to survive. Our systems in place are not there to lift people out of poverty, but they can and should be.
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum by Antonia Hylton
I was really on the fence about getting this book because I don’t like reading history books, but damn, this book sucked me in. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop. Antonia Hylton is an incredible writer and writes about a segregated psychiatric hospital and the history of Black patients going through there.
In this book, you learn about the history of mental illness in the Black community while they were also dealing with a lot of racism and mistreatment. Hylton was able to interview many people who either used to work at the hospital or had family members who were committed there.
You learn about the poor treatment of Black people in this hospital and how the patients as well as the family members suffered. Hylton also does an excellent job showing how the mental health treatment of Black people was easily turned into the prison industrial complex once the nation started shutting down these psychiatric hospitals and the mentally ill are now being imprisoned.
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