Nate Bowling

2016 WA State Teacher of the Year. Nat'l Teacher of the Year Finalist. Milken Award Winner. Co-Founder @TeachersUtdWa. Host @nerdfarmpod, #EduColor Member

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Book Recommendations:

NB

Recommended by Nate Bowling

@Sifill_LDF @soledadobrien The first and best Philip Roth book I read was called "The Plot Against America." It's wild as hell to watch it unfold IRL. https://t.co/ZWLkHjs5a2 https://t.co/shcD2kJ3Zi (from X)

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president. In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother. "A terrific political novel . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

NB

Recommended by Nate Bowling

I'm reading "Kindred" by Octavia Butler. I can't do it justice on this silly platform. The book is grim in its depiction of slavery, insightful about modern racial dynamics, and contains the best execution of time travel, as a plot device, you'll ever read. https://t.co/Z4J4jlQbwG (from X)

Kindred book cover

Octavia E. Butler(you?)

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.