Ask a Bookseller: ‘Dictionary of the Undoing’ by John Freeman

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.For the next few weeks, Ask a Bookseller will focus on books that emphasize hope and connection. Booksellers will point to everything from romance to science fiction to nonfiction in various forms.This week, John Evans of Camino Books: For the Road Ahead in Del Mar, Calif., recommends a book of essays, “Dictionary of the Undoing” by John Freeman. In 26 essays, one for each letter of the alphabet, Freeman explores how we can use individual words to engage civilly with each other in divisive times. Freeman has made a life of letters; he’s a former editor of Granta, a writer, literary critic and an executive editor at Knopf. The book was published in late 2019. Evans said it didn’t get deserved attention amid the pandemic.The book is “recreating the architecture of hope in the words we use, how we conceive of ourselves, how our best can be expressed in words, and how we have to recover so much of what it is to be human. A great place to do this is with language,” Evans said. “He is concerned with civility, which is a kind of love in action, a communal recognition of our human togetherness. [He] retrieves the things we know internally by exploring the language we can use to articulate this collectively.“He conversationally takes you through the untying of words like citizen, justice, love, rage, spirit, like the friend you most like to get together with over coffee. The essays build on each other, utilizing words from previous chapters until you feel more human, more hopeful and more necessarily engaged in embodying a world you would like to live in.”