The Read Harder Challenge strikes again. Task 15 for this year was to read a YA non-fiction work, and that is an area of my to read list that is stunningly small. I thought I had a book picked out, but it turned out to not be YA (but, The Art and Life of Hilma af Klint was still an enjoyable read). I went back to the Arlington, VA Public library list of books you might have missed in 2023 to produce some additional ideas since they organized it so well (seriously, they are not my library, but their website has been super helpful).
This time I came away with Doomed: Sacco, Vanzetti, & the End of the American Dream by John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro. I remembered studying Sacco and Vanzetti in school but could not remember which crime they were falsely accused and convicted of having committed. Doomed does a commendable job of getting to details of the crime out of the way early (robbery and murder), and then spends the time looking at the two men who were accused of it and how they were ultimately victims of the 1920s Red Scare, fear and misunderstanding of anarchist thought, and anti-immigration fearmongering.
I am not the intended audience for this book, and that is okay. My most important takeaway was an understanding of who Sacco and Vanzetti were as people – something too often left out of the historical narrative. I do think it could be a definitive resource for this case specifically, which is good as it is so often a touchpoint in education about the Red Scare, and the milieu of the U.S. during the 1920s (and in some ways now). I wish it had landed a little harder on how the failures of the system have not gone away, but that may be a wish too far for the goals of the authors.
faintingviolet 