Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

Original Sins, by Eve L. Ewing (One World). This stark critique of America’s schools anchors our current educational system in eighteenth-century ideas about race and intelligence. Tracing a line from Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” through Jim Crow to present-day policies on housing, zoning, and standardized testing, Ewing argues that this system was always intended to operate differently for different people. It aimed to make good citizens out of whites and “a class of subservient laborers” out of Blacks, and to culturally erase Native Americans altogether. For Ewing, the varying life outcomes of these groups indicate that our schools not only reflect society’s racial hierarchies but “play an active role in constructing, normalizing, and upholding them.”

Strike, by Sarah E. Bond (Yale). Rebellion in ancient Rome is commonly associated with a single man: Spartacus, the leader of the Third Servile War. But this incisive history contends that it’s a mistake to attribute the uprising to a single individual’s ingenuity, or to imagine that any act of collective defiance in the Empire was an isolated occurrence. Bond shows how professional and trade associations empowered bakers, gladiators, charioteers, and the like to wield their leverage—for example, by withholding their labor—in pursuit of improved conditions. Employing “strategic anachronism,” she connects their struggles to contemporary union efforts, emphasizing the ways in which, from antiquity to the present, solidarity among workers has persisted despite backlash from the ruling classes.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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