Long form reading may be a relic of the past for younger generations in US society and culture for a variety of reasons, but I still believe in both the power of reading and its importance in our shared civic culture. For a number of years now, I’ve maintained a public aspirational reading list on […]
Long form reading may be a relic of the past for younger generations in US society and culture for a variety of reasons, but I still believe in both the power of reading and its importance in our shared civic culture. For a number of years now, I’ve maintained a public aspirational reading list on Amazon. Often when I come across a book I want to read, I’ll also share it across my social media channels with the hashtag, #book2read. This weekend, my life partner and I spent a wonderful Saturday in Salisbury, North Carolina, and we visited the South Main Book Store. Like Main Street Books in Davidson, I just love being able to view and browse the selections of books their employees have curated with care. I found eight books I am interested in reading at some point, but just purchased one on Saturday: “Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America” by Gene Nichol. The rest I scanned with my iOS Amazon app and added to my reading list, and I’m going to share them in this post with a few details about why they caught my eye and made my aspirational Amazon reading list.
“Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, and the Future of America” by Gene Nichol was my top selection yesterday because its themes are so important to current events and the issues I’m wrestling with personally, just over a month since our 47th chief executive assumed power in Washington D.C. The book description is:
North Carolina had a big, unfortunate headstart on now-common attacks on democratic institutions—the lessons learned as NC makes its way out of the chaos can benefit other states. Attacks from the radical right will plague the entire nation for the foreseeable future, and now is the time to seek out the causes and find the path to remedy them. In his most personal book yet, Indecent Assembly author Gene Nichol, takes on, unsurprisingly, race, religion, poverty, higher education, constitutionalism, movement politics, the meaning of North Carolina proper. He forecasts the future of democratic promise in the state, the South, and the United States. This book is not reportage, but rather a cri de coeur, with inspiration and aspiration for the next generation.
I had not heard of Gene Nichol previously, and have searched unsuccessfully for a Substack newsletter or other blog / website he may be updating with is views on current events. If you’re aware of one, please let me know, I couldn’t find anything tonight. According to his bio from the Charlotte Area Fund in December 2023:
Gene Nichol is a distinguished professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He was director of the UNC Poverty Center (2008-2015) until it was closed by the Board of Governors for publishing articles critical of the governor and General Assembly. Nichol was president of the College of William & Mary (2005-2008), law dean at the University of Colorado (1988-1995) and dean at UNC from 1999-2005.
I’m just getting started in the book but am hopeful Dr. Nichol will have some insights I can share with our ThriveEDU group as well as via my own Patreon community (Dangerous Ideas with Wes Fryer: human rights, democratic norms, tolerance, and media literacy) as well as my aspirational and long-term project, “Heal Our Culture.”
The first of seven books to be added to my aspirational reading list was “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future” by Jason Stanley. As an educator and storychaser, I believe deeply in the importance of studying history from multiple vantage points so we can not only better understand past actions and decisions, but also strive to DO BETTER with our own choices in the future.
This book reminds me of “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” by Rachel Maddow, which I listened to on Audible last summer and highly recommend also. So many of us are wondering, “What can we do?” in the face of regime change in the United States and ascendant fascism. Maddow offers hope by studying the actions and resilience of those who opposed fascism leading up to and during World War II here in the United States, and I suspect Jason Stanley’s book offers similar prescriptions and “playbook suggestions.” When I encounter those, I’m planning to add them to “The Menu of Resistance” collection which our ThriveEDU group is starting to curate and build using Notion AI.
My second book to make my reading list but not personal book collection (yet) is Slaveroad by by John Edgar Wideman.
The GoodReads description of Slaveroad is:
John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists. In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard”, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.” An impassioned, searching work,Slaveroad is one man’s reckoning with a uniquely American lineage and the ways that the past haunts the “It’s here. Now. Where we are. What we are. A story compounded of stories told, retold, untold, not told.”
In order to “Heal our Culture” I’m convinced we need to individually as well as collectively engage in the difficult and challenging work of racial healing. I described some of my reasoning supporting this contention in my February 11, 2025 post, “Anti-Racism.” Some of the organizations I’ve included in my resource website for HealOurCulture.org are focused on racial healing, like “Coming to the Table.” Some of my own work with Storychasers focuses on racial healing through digital storytelling. One of the important elements of a “new civics curriculum” which we need to teach in our communities through our churches and other organizations (even if we cannot presently through our public schools) involves “hard history” including the factual history of slavery in the United States and the Americas. Some of the stories I’ve started learning about and sharing specific to Salisbury, North Carolina, fit into this genre of “hard history.” This also includes stories I’ve shared in the past 3 years from the Latta Plantation, from Philadelphia Church in Mint Hill, and from Brattonsville, South Carolina. I still need to edit and share a video a recorded 2 years ago at the cemetery of formerly enslaved Charlotteans right across the street from our school and from Sardis Presbyterian Church. Living now in North Carolina instead of the midwest of the USA, this antebellum history of slavery is all around me, and I want to continue both learning more about it and encouraging others to do the same. This is one tangible way we can seek together to dismantle racism. It involves confronting whiteness, in part by making formerly “invisible” chapters of history and our own family histories visible to discuss, process, and heal through.
Next book on my list: “Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan” by David Cunningham. It’s alarming and unfortunate that the KKK was very active and influential in Union County, North Carolina, where we live just outside Charlotte. Members of our Charlotte church actually witnessed a Klan march a few years ago in nearby Waxhaw. The legacy and influence of hate groups like the KKK is sadly not “ancient history” in our nation, and new generations of white supremacists have been and continue to be emboldened not only through social media but also through the words and actions of elected government officials. My work since 2019 on the “Conspiracies and Culture Wars” media literacy inquiry project continues, and part of those studies involve examining how extremist groups seek to foment political change as well as political terror in our society. Books like this one by David Cunningham are therefore (unfortunately) of interest to me.
The next book to be added to my reading wish list is “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times” by Athena Aktipis.
As a Boy Scout and Eagle Scout, I’ve been an advocate for emergency preparedness since I was in middle school. As an adult, influenced in part by my periodic immersion in right wing media (including YouTube) my interest in and awareness for the importance of family emergency preparedness has led me to start my “Communitarian Prepper” website and video series / YouTube channel. I’m not a “tin foil hat wearing Zombie apocalypse prepper,” but I am an Eagle Scout and former USAF SERE survival instructor who has lived long enough through Oklahoma ice storms and other power outage events to know it’s wise to prepare for natural as well as human-caused disasters.
Next book on my wish list: “Capitalism and Slavery” by Eric Williams. As explained previously, I’m very interested in the history and legacy of slavery in the United States and our world. I’m a very outspoken advocate for human rights. We need to understand our economic and political history so we can make informed and constructive choices as voters and leaders in our communities, nation and world. This is “hard history,” but also important history. The past often does serve as a prologue for the present and the future. Topics like this may be distasteful to the Project 2025 fans in our current administration and nation, but they remain important none-the-less.
The next book on my list is also historical in focus: “Colonial North Carolina” by Joe A. Mobley. I like local history, and I want to know more about the history of our state and home.
The last book I added to my reading list Saturday is, “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” by Tony Horwitz.
The subtitle, “Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War” reminds me of Heather Cox Richardson‘s outstanding book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America.” I also listened to her book last summer on Audible. Before reading it, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to how the social and political elites of southern plantations and the “aristocracy of the south” continue to exert dramatic political influence in the United States today.
I think this book by Tony Horowitz will shed further light on these historical and contemporary dynamics.
Make no mistake my friends, we find ourselves in early 2025 in the United States of America in a protracted struggle for the soul of our very nation and culture. Together, we need to heal our culture. But our path forward is not abundantly clear, however. We do not currently have national leaders who can articulate both a vision and “shared story” for humane, respectful, collaborative, and peaceful future which I and many, many others desire and dream of.
So, to this aspirational end, ideas and reading matter. I hope some of these book titles are of interest to you. If they are, or if you have feedback on the ideas I’ve shared here, please let me know via a comment or another social media channel.
BlueSky is currently my favorite.
