5 Surprising (?) Books on My Shelf

It’s like a Mary Roach deep dive, but into taxidermy! Journalist Milgrom goes from “the anachronistic family workshop of the last chief taxidermist for the American Museum of Natural History to the studio where an English sculptor, granddaughter of a surrealist artist, preserves the animals for Damien Hirst’s most disturbing artworks.” And beyond! Obviously I bought this. How could you not.

This university press American women’s suffrage history book is apparently not the first thing you’d maybe reach for. BUT. This is the story of Adella Hunt Logan, a Black suffragist who “taught at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute but also joined the segregated woman suffrage movement, passing for white in order to fight for the rights of people of color.” Alexander is Logan’s granddaughter, and she grew up hearing her family refer to Tuskegee as “the Hither Isles.”

I have multiple histories of Germany. One is because it has a very fun cover (Germania) and this one because it promises up front that it’s gonna be short. It asks questions like how Roman did Germania ever become? How did Prussia come about (and whatever happened to Prussia)? And more modern questions, but I like things before people stopped wearing fun hats.

I have a lot of books about the history of women in America! They are on some of my “no, we can’t donate books in this genre” shelves. I’m proud of this one because it feels like a deep cut of the work of Daina Ramey Berry, also known for co-authoring A Black Women’s History of the United States. No, you’re right, a real deep cut would be 2007’s “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. I don’t have that one. YET. But this one “shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments.” Berry researched this for over ten years! And she “resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.”

Did you know they used clamshell razors in colonial America? And that at least 85% of American women regularly remove hair from their bodies? Historian Herzig examines what’s up with that. She also shows how over time, mainstream American beliefs about visible hair changed, and how its existence — “particularly on young, white women—came to be perceived as a sign of political extremism, sexual deviance, or mental illness.” Wow! That seems bad. We should probably think about that more.