George of Sylvania

Category: book

  • Not Soon Enough

    There are some books that stick with you long after they are finished and one of my 25 of 2025 books, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad is one of them.

    From the National Book Foundation:

    On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

    As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

    The way that El Akkad writes, it is like you are walking with him through what is going on, and parts of this book still stick in my mind over a year after reading. El Akkad provides a harsh look at the reality of what has happened to Palestinians, and everyone needs to read this. The title of this post, “Not Soon Enough” comes from my personal view of not understanding the long history of apartheid, and other horrors Palestinians have endured.

    Something I want to be very clear about is, the country of Israel that has been around since 1948, Judaism, and the ancient Israel of the Christian and Jewish Bibles, are not the same thing. I have spent most of my professional life in ministry working to weed out the anti semitic remarks, theology, and general view that Christians I cross paths with have unknowingly adopted. This is true in my writing, and academic pursuits as well.

    I state this because what is happening in Gaza, and Palestine in general is atrocious, and the fact that my tax dollars are helping fund this genocide makes my stomach turn. If like me, you had spent time in the group of believing that supporting Israel was not only the most moral thing, but what God required of you, but no longer feel that way, this book is for you. Like I said previously, it is not an easy read, but one worth doing.

    10/10, you can purchase it here.

  • Ignorance Personified

    Ignorance Personified

    In 1966, my father was walking with my grandfather from their car to one of the libraries in Dayton Ohio. While they were in route, my dad looked over and saw a group of people he didn’t recognize. So he asked my grandfather, “dad, why are those guys walkin’ around in nothin’ but their bed sheets?” The way my dad tells it, my grandfather shook his head and responded with, “Mike, that right there, is ignorance personified.” As the story goes, the white supremacists were showing up in hopes to intimidate the Dayton School Board to cave to their wishes. I was in early high school or late junior high when my dad told me about this, and it something I will never forget.

    How my grandfather described the ku klux klan in those two words has latched on to my soul, and has shaped my implicit bias when it comes to white supremacy. Anyone who thinks they are better than someone else, that has to “other” a fellow human based on the color of their skin is ignorant. However this description doesn’t pertain to just white supremacy, but it is a great encapsulation of the concept of bullies as a whole.

    It is not hyperbolic to say that we are living in a time where white supremacy is being enforced in ways two generations have not seen, but if we had only listened to black women and had taken them seriously it could all have been avoided.

    Like most decent people, I have been feeling a mix of speechlessness, disgust, and dismay with how this current administration has carried itself for the past year and a half (as well as the first four years of it). Not because I am shocked by anything they have done, for over a decade those of us who have been paying attention and doing the work have been told we are overreacting. So while sitting with this puddle of emotions I started a new book that is uncomfortably relevant. Last year my wife read, A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, penned by Timothy Egan, she told me I needed to pick it up, and I finally did. It is about the rise of the KKK in the early 20th century focused on Indiana, and it touches on how it shaped membership, American policy, and the murder of a young woman. Yesterday I was reading when I stumbled upon this little section:

    To the major victories of outlawing alcohol, disenfranchising black voters, and closing the door on most new immigrants ,the klan now hoped to set up a parallel government in the capital just as it had done in Indiana. The other goal was to prohibit the teaching of evolution.

    The klan backed a law in Tennessee that made it a crime for a public school teacher to explain any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught in the Bible. The fear was that if evolution were accepted it would imply that all people have a common origin.

    For the klan that meant that there was no fundamental difference from themselves and the race they pretend to despise.

    I added the underlining in the quote above, but today people are still pushing klan ideology. None of this should be surprising, considering the moral majority and religious right were born out of the racist gripe of not wanting to integrate schools. Vouchers, and school of choice became the voice of this version of christanity before Roe v. Wade would be a glimmer in their eye. For myself, this is part of what makes the voter suppression and rights stripped over the past few weeks so hard to stomach.

    In 2021 Georgia passed SB 202, which changed early voting, and prohibited anyone other than poll workers from handing out water, which is what many of us call voter suppression. As mentioned previously, the past week we have seen what remained of the Voter Rights Act of 1965 stripped away. In that time, the states that originally voted against this act, have responded quickly with suppressing black voices by gerrymandering new maps. All decent people watching this happen in real time are reminded how deep white supremacy runs, and how much it ruins. What our current Supreme Court has done to this country is not only disgusting, but continues to prove white supremacy is alive and well in the halls of “justice.”

    However, upholding white supremacy in these halls is nothing new, so why are we surprised when they come after the rights of people of color. The truth is, what is happening now is breaking norms we naively thought would not be undone. Did we worry about it? Absolutely. Did white people take seriously the concerns of people of color when it came to what was on the line for the past decade? Absolutely not. For over a year we have been living with the domestic terrorism that the federal government has sanctioned when it comes to the disappearance of citizens and migrantes. It reminded me of another passage from Egan’s book:

    The klan would be a major force at the national conventions, no one onboard… doubted that the future of the country belonged to an organization of shrouded men clinging to the past.

    The fight over the last decade from the “America First” crowd has led us to this moment where the lives of our neighbors have been disrupted and destroyed by men in masks who are being led by others clinging to the past. Egan wrote in his book about the state elections that occured in just barely 100 years ago in Indiana that resulted in, “hundreds of small ways these [klan] loyalists could make life worse for those who were not white Protestants.” For years we have been seeing people say the quiet part out loud, and in reading that line I was disgusted by how relevant it still is. What is happening in Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and other southern strongholds to suppress black and people of color’s voice right now is exactly why we must not remain silent.

    The reintroduction of Jim Crow voting districts, and the stripping of rights by christian nationalists, and others, does not reflect the values of Jesus. Groups like this do not want Jesus, because to follow him means to seek out the other and care for them. To be a good neighbor does not mean to have a mirror image next door, it is to welcome the diversity that makes all of us better. It is to say no to ignorance and yes to curiosity. It also means to practice the paradox of tolerance that Karl Popper made famous. This act where your society remains intolerant of the intolerant, by stamping out hate speech or othering, and uprooting white supremacy wherever it tries to flourish.

    I know that I am not the only one who feels the weight sitting on their chest about what is happening right now in the United States, and it feels like nothing can be done. We are not alone, and we can do many good things together, we just need to be brave and curious. This is a time to make our voices heard, one way is to follow this link to 5 Calls. It will take you to their, “Protect the Right to Vote and Fair Representation” page where you can call your representatives and ask them to support fair voting rights. Get friends together and turn it into a party, you’d be surprised to find out how much easier it is to do this with a crowd of those you love and trust.

    My friends, it is up to us to carry on this work, and I am asking you to do your part in this peacemaking. Non-violence resistance has worked in the past, and it will continue to work if we remain steadfast and curious.

    Grace and peace my friends.

  • Nuclear War: A Scenario

    Nuclear War: A Scenario

    This post is brought to you by our current executive branch, the country committing ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the trouble they are causing in the Arab World.

    In 2024 I read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey which was the first time in possibly 20 plus years I had spent reading about World War Two. When I was in junior high and high school, I was obsessed with that period of history, whether it was through video games, movies, or television, it was all I liked to study. My grandfather served in the Pacific Theater on the U.S.S. Drayton as a Signalman, which heavily influenced my decision to join the military after I graduated high school.

    Spending time looking through his photo scrapbook that included his initiation into the Domain of Neptunus Rex as he crossed the equator left me with a romanticized version of this history. He had been dead for a while and all I had to go on was what he left behind, and I constantly ignored my dad telling me that he (my grandfather) would have taken my dad to their fishing cabin in Canada. Thank God I have lived long enough to be ashamed of supporting our military industrial complex, and the war crimes they have been committing.

    Anyway, back to the book.

    In this almost second by second account of what happens if the US were to experience and respond to a nuclear bomb, it really makes you sick with how much can go wrong in such a short time. The fragility around this, and the fragility of what it takes to maintain our nuclear arsenal displays how truly weak our leaders are to result to this kind of destruction. In short:

    These weapons should not exist.

    The infrastructure around these weapons should not exist.

    The people leading the country right now should never have access to this kind of destructive power.

    These are things I have believed for a few years, but, this book will cement it in the long run.

    10/10, this should be a must read for everyone.

  • From a Certain Point of View

    From a Certain Point of View

    The title of the blog post this week comes from the incredible Obi-Wan Kenobi after he is dropping the bombshell of Darth Vader being Luke’s father in Return of the Jedi. That concept is what came to mind while reading The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J. Russell Hawkins because of how this book approaches this time in history. I have never read anything from the intentional perspective of the oppressors in such an unpolished and disturbing way, and I mean that as a compliment.

    Similar to how Jesus and John Wayne should be required reading, The Bible Told Them So ought to be as well. To be honest, I am shocked that the author is on staff at Indiana Wesleyan University. To be candid, yes I was put on academic suspension from their while attending online from 2009-2012; however, for how evangelicals and conservatives have acted for over a decade, it would seem like this book shouldn’t see the light of day. But Dr. Hawkins delivers this ugly history in a way only a professor can. Some of it is hard to read because of the academic setting (it’s an Oxford Press book for crying out loud), but the subject.

    Chapter One, Not in Our Church, focuses on the “congregational backlash to Brown v. Board of Education. Hawkins recounts the story of Rev. Fred T. Laughton on the third anniversary of his time at First Baptist Church in Orangeburg South Carolina. A location where General Sherman had made his way to, and burned quite a bit of, leaving the church alone. However, 30 years after the war, a statue of a confederate solider was erected across the street from the church. The white women who were behind the statue invited former confederate Col. James Armstrong to speak, where he said this statue would be a reminder of all that was lost, and to hold on to those memories.

    It is no wonder in this environment 64 years later, that things did not go well for Rev. Laughon.

    Laughon’s inability to help his white parishioners harmonize their Christian faith with the idea of racial equality was related both consciously and unconsciously to the congregation’s veneration of the Lost Cause. Just as James Armstrong had hoped the monument’s dedication in 1893, the Confederate statue had helped sustain notions about white supremacy and the supposed proper racial order in southern society.

    -pg. 17

    Like most books about the birth of the evangelical movement, you find out about how baked racism is into it, after all, charter christian schools, and school choice, were started for a reason. Hint: it wasn’t because Jerry Falwell Sr. had a better sense of educational values, it was the racism.

    If you haven’t, I recommend spending some time focusing on the cover of this book, and what appear to be three generations of people protesting integration. Anyone who has been around kids from birth to growth can tell you they aren’t born racist. Like most things, bigotry is taught, caught, and sought. It is so ingrained in who some people are they will claim not to see color, but have no problem telling racist jokes.

    Last month was Black History month, and I need every white person reading this blog to buy this book and read it. Then, do the work that is making you feel uncomfortable as you finish it. After that, go read more by Black authors about the horrific things we have done to the Black community, because it is bad.

    Anyway, 10/10 highly recommend this book.

    Grace and peace friends.

  • Ring Shout by P. Déjlí Clark

    Ring Shout by P. Déjlí Clark

    Book 3 of my 25 of 2025 is here.

    I love the horror genre, not the brutal torture and gore of the sake of it, but the jump scare, ghosts, monsters, and whatever in between. In the past few years have really delved into the bookish side. To be honest, I am not sure where the love of it comes from, maybe it was watching Ghostbusters as a toddler?

    Could it have been going to the library with my grandmother and spending all my time looking through the Crestwood House Monster Series books. A series of books where the covers were black and white photos of the Universal Monster movies that captivated my eyes and mind at a young age. Either way, this has been my genre of choice when I find that I am bored, or looking for something familiar.

    It should be no surprise knowing this about me, that when I saw the cover for, Ring Shout, by P. Déjlí Clark, I was captivated and knew this would be on my top of the year list. If like me, you were incredibly angry at the cancellation of Lovecraft Country on HBO, this will fill a sort of gap for now.

    From Clark’s website:

    D. W. Griffith is a sorcerer, and The Birth of a Nation is a spell that drew upon the darkest thoughts and wishes from the heart of America. Now, rising in power and prominence, the Klan has a plot to unleash Hell on Earth.

    Luckily, Maryse Boudreaux has a magic sword and a head full of tales. When she’s not running bootleg whiskey through Prohibition Georgia, she’s fighting monsters she calls “Ku Kluxes.” She’s damn good at it, too. But to confront this ongoing evil, she must journey between worlds to face otherworldly nightmares—and her own demons. Together with a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter, Maryse sets out to save a world from the hate that would consume it.

    American history is rich with the brutal treatment of people of color at the hands of white people, and while Clark does some really creative work with the revamp of the klan, it builds on the true and horrific history. The white legacy is of treating Black and people of color in this country would make you vomit if we taught the truth in school. That is also why this book is so important to read. After all it is easy to ignore that the United States and the way we treated Indigenous Peoples was an inspiration to Hitler and how he treated European Jewish people.

    Not only is the concept brilliant, but the way that Clark weaves many genre’s is so well done. There are so many twists and turns in this book, you really need to pay attention while reading it.

    Highly recommend this one if you are a fan of the genre, even if you’re not, get uncomfortable and read it.

    At least purchase a copy.

  • Percival Everette

    Percival Everette

    In 2025 I read two books by Percival Everette, Assumption and The Trees. Both of these should have made my personal best of list, but I just went with the one that stuck with me most. The Trees, for me, is up there with season one of True Detective, as a perfect piece of crime fiction. Here is the description from the publishers website:

    Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

    The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

    In what starts off as a typical brutal crime story, it evolves into a story that I don’t want to know the answers to. It is a rare thing for me to read or engage in something where I am okay not knowing all the answers to, but this is close to the top of the charts. Similar to how I would have been okay if season 3 of Twin Peaks never came to be, this could have ended a chapter early and I would have been just as happy.

    The way that Everette is able to move seemingly effortlessly between genres and stories shows how much of a master of the craft he is. My wife and I still talk about this book probably once every 3-5 weeks and it is striking how many details stick out.

    Walk don’t run to your local brick and mortar or library and get this book.

    Grace and peace.

  • Are we the Baddies?

    Are we the Baddies?

    Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen was one of my first books out the gate in 2025, and I still think about it. When I think of the detailed research of this book, what comes to mind is, The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees, another one worth your time, because of the minutia Jacobsen goes into.

    If you are unaware of Operation Paperclip, it was the name given when the United States government brought n*zi scientists into the US to work on military projects, health and medicine, and the space race. The lengths of which the government forgave the acts of despicable men in the name of “fighting” communism made me almost physically sick while reading. One doctor who was working on hypothermia continued his work in the US that had been conducted on prisoners.

    Per the books description:

    In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States.

    Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

    Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

    I enjoy a hard read, and this one was difficult. The complicity of our government to do horrible things is not a secret. After all H*tler was influenced by our treatment of Indigenous people and eugenics is a very American science. But to see how quickly people are willing to throw away morality in the name of power makes me physically sick.

    This meme is still true, especially when we consider the cruel actions of our current administration.

    That said, 10/10 read, you should read this book. It will drop scales from your eyes in a very needed way. Some of it may be old hat, but even portions of that

    Grace and peace.

  • The Tears of Things

    The Tears of Things

    By Emil Nolde – Museum of Modern Art, New York, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12197419

    There must be someone in every age who can tell the faith community, and society at large, Your first egoic glance at life–and God– is largely wrong! And it is largely engendered by fear.”

    – Fr. Richard Rohr

    I started reading Father Richard Rohr when I was still a reluctant evangelical. It was during the reconstructing of my faith phase where I picked up Falling Upward. If I remember correctly, I had either heard him on a Rob Bell Robcast, or a recommendation from my friend Adam. This book drove me to a place of openness not just about his work, but to my approach of God. While I laugh to myself now about being concerned reading a catholic priests book, the idea of approaching God and others at the time with love over dogma/theological treaties, coming from a Roman Catholic priest, was mind blowing.

    In October, I had just finished presiding over a memorial service for a friend when a woman I consider a prophet in our times approached me with a book. We had shared this bizarre end of life journey together with this mutual friend, and given she is a close to 90 year old spiritual director, I tend to listen when she has something to say. It was Richard Rohr’s new book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. The book was accompanied by a card, and part of what she wrote inside said, “I think this may be of interest since Rohr’s contemplating and acting is much of who you are.”

    The amount that this card and her thoughts touched me, I cannot properly describe, however, I am still touched by it. Especially since I have now enjoyed Fr. Rohr’s work for well over a decade. Each one of his books build on one another, but for me this one takes the cake. The place of a modern prophet is something I have struggled with, especially considering how most of American Christianity treats the concept of one.

    This book is scratching that itch in a way I never thought possible. For quite a while, I have adopted a mantra a friend of mine introduced me to, which is, “the status quo is a bully.”As I am deep in editing my next book, which is a call for peacemaking, I spend time talking about standing against the status quo. So when I read this quote from Rohr’s new book, I had to sit in silence for a moment.

    “We have spent the centuries and millennia since constructing the same kinds of self-serving power centers that Jesus and the prophets denounced, and most of us are resigned to this status quo.” pg. 22

    Structures and systems exist for a reason, and some of these are good. Some continue to uphold the system for the sake of the system, because we have to keep the system in place to uphold the status quo.

    Any “normal” way of business that continues to keep people in states of marginalization and oppression are not “normal” or “moral.”

    The want or need to have power over another person is not a “normal” or “moral.”

    The federal level of government and how it has treated people in the United States may have been “normalized” over the centuries, it has never been “moral.”

    The kidnapping of American citizens is not “normal.”

    Abducting heads of foreign states is not “normal” especially when we are not at war is not “normal.”

    Friends, look for and listen to the prophets in your life who are calling for the liberation of the oppressed.

    Look for the ones who remind us that, as Rohr writes, “we like our illusions, we like having enemies, and we are quite accustomed to our wars and prejudices as much as we insist the contrary.”

    Look for the ones calling for leading with love, and accountability for those who have been wronged.

    We need them, and you, now more than ever.

    Grace and peace.

  • Top 25 of 25: Book Look Back

    Top 25 of 25: Book Look Back

    Books, not my actual home library
    Photo by Juan Pablo Serrano on Pexels.com

    I enjoy reading, a lot. I do not care if it is physical, digital, or audio, books are a constant companion in my life. To the point where I have averaged reading about 73 a year since I started tracking them in 2020.

    I just love the concept of them, how words can contain multitudes of worlds. The smell of them, the thrill of finding one you’ve been looking for. This is not always a relationship I have had with them. Growing up I also liked the idea of them, I would read almost any of the Great Illustrated Classics I could get a hold of. As someone with a reading disorder, that was incredibly embarrassing, those classics were perfect for me. Every other page was an illustration, and it helped immerse me in the story.

    The only books I remember reading that was required in high school were A Tale of Two Cities (which I love) and A Catcher in the Rye (which I hate). When I joined the navy, I spent time out to sea reading in the tower I worked in, and would get through maybe a book a month. Then I found out about audio books, which started my practice of purchasing two copies, one to listen to, one to mark up and use for rereading/bettering comprehension.

    As my interest in theology deepened so did my insistence on reading physical copies of books. This allowed me to destroy whatever book was in my path; underlining, writing in the margins, dog-earing, whatever. I still do this, then pull out whatever half filled moleskin I thought would fix me to start writing the ideas and thoughts that came with whatever I had just read.

    During the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to try out more fiction, which was something I did not really want to do. Do not get me wrong, I was not taking an elitist position, it was just that fiction wasn’t something I liked outside of my comic books or graphic novels. At the time I just preferred to read non-fiction or theology if I was going to dedicate the time to picking up a book. I wanted to learn something true about the universe/world/life/whatever, if I was giving up anywhere from 5-12 hours of my time. It was when I started back to school to finish my bachelors degree, and after we had our kid that I took her advice.

    I was so wrong for waiting so long.

    With all of that in mind, please enjoy the top 25 books I read in 2025. These are listed in no particular order, and over the next year I will be posting about each one individually. Some posts may be long, some will be short, but in the dark time we find ourselves in where Americans are being abducted by masked police, a white kid who has no business podcasting are trying to break into daycare’s, and abducting a leader of a foreign country, sometimes a book recommendation will help provide some balm to the soul.

    1. Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America by Annie Jacobsen
    2. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé
    3. We Uyghurs Have No Voice: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks by Ilham Tohti
    4. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
    5. The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy by J. Russell Hawkins
    6. Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica 
    7. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning
    8. Monk and Robot: A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers
    9. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
    10. Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobs
    11. The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness by Gregory Boyle
    12. Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
    13. Ring Shout by P. Djéli Clark
    14. The Trees by Percival Everette
    15. The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality by Anna-Lisa Cox
    16. The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 by Tim Madigan
    17. The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby 
    18. The Black Wolf by Louise Penny
    19. Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America by Robert B. Reich
    20. Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery by BROM
    21. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future by Jason Stanley  
    22. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    23. King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
    24. Bringing the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew 
    25. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

    Grace and peace my friends, and happy new year.