Scott Shane is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, where he has covered national security since 2004.His new book is Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone.
Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:
I've recently finished Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon, which I'm catching up with several years late. It's a revelatory book about the resumption of forced labor in much of the South after the Civil War, in the guise of forcing AfricanVisit Scott Shane's website.American men to work off fines for bogus crimes (loitering, for instance) with months of unpaid labor. I live in Baltimore and have long had an interest in the history of slavery and abolition here, and years ago as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun I wrote a lot about race, poverty, drugs, crime and incarceration. It's taken me a long time, but I can now see more clearly the continuity of the oppression of African Americans from slavery, through the kind of semi-slavery Blackmon documents, through Jim Crow, and to the era of mass incarceration we live in today. I highly recommend the book -- not an easy read, but written with great passion and formidable research -- to
anyone interested in American history and the role of race.
And now I'm halfway through a novel by Tim Gautreaux called The Clearing, another one that I heard about, bought and then left to mature in the bedroom pile for a few years. It tells the story of two brothers brought together at a saw mill in the 1920s in rural Louisiana. One experienced the horrors of World War I. And that's about all I should reveal about this engrossing, beautifully written book.
The Page 99 Test: Objective Troy.
My Book, The Movie: Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
