THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM by Jared Yates Sexton is a fairly scholarly non-fiction text which points to increasingly authoritarian leaders and systems, arguing "under the surface is pure, unvarnished white patriarchal supremacy" and "the intentional weaponizing of faith and fear in the pursuit of power and profit."Overall, the content seems fairly difficult for our high school students to digest, especially without more background knowledge and a more academic vocabulary. However, fans of Sexton's Muckrake podcast and of his other writings like American Rule are likely to value this book. How ironic that a title which the publisher describes in part as "exposing the hypocrisy and conspiratorial thinking that informed Western society's self-image" became available during the same week that the Florida School Board of Education rejected the teaching of AP African American Studies (link to New York Times story below). As Sexton notes in THE MIDNIGHT KINGDOM, "entrenched power has always attempted to suppress information and wield it as a weapon."

Link to NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/us/desantis-florida-ap-african-american-studies.html