READING FOR THE RESISTANCE

Unabridged Bookstore is excited to continue our series #readingisresistance.  Featuring new books or classic texts that are relevant for one to remain informed, engaged and sane in these crazy political times. 

Read important books about what is happening in our world now!  Read to escape, but also read to become informed!  Read history books!  Read current event books!  Read as if your democracy depended on it - because it does!  Reading is educating oneself.  Reading encourages free thinking.  Reading is the sharing of ideas.  Reading is a political act.  Reading is an antidote to cynicism. Reading recognizes demagoguery and rejects it. Reading is resistance.

Check out this important essay by Aleksandar Hemon entitled, "Fascism is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It's a Set of Actions to Fight: https://lithub.com/fascism-is-not-an-idea-to-be-debated-its-a-set-of-actions-to-fight/

 

We would like to take a moment to acknowledge the events of the past week.  We join the chorus of voices condemning the murder of George Floyd, and the chorus of voices calling for justice and change. Unequivocally, Black Lives Matter!  We support the right of our community to peacefully assemble and the right to peacefully protest against injustice.  We remain passionately dedicated to raising the consciousness of our community, supporting all peaceful, constructive and non-violent efforts at eradicating systemic racism. We are in support of a diverse and inclusive community where all people, especially people of color, feel safe, and we feel fortunate to be part of this community for 40 years. We want our store and our neighborhood to continue to be a safe space for all people. We want to celebrate the inclusivity and diversity of our neighborhood while at the same time fighting for change.  May we all continue to expand our circle of empathy to continue to fight the fear of the other.

ANTI-RACIST READING LIST

Please be aware that due to high demand many of these titles are on backorder and may take some time to arrive before pickup! For any questions, email us at unabridgedbookstore@gmail.com or call at 773.883.9119!

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X	Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates	Citizen by Claudie Rankine	The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein	Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin	The Fire This Time Edited by Jesmyn Ward	Ghosts in the Schoolyard by Eve L. Ewing	Heavy by Kiese Laymon	Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou	I'm Still Here by Austin Channing Brown	Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson	Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad	The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander	Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde	So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo	Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson	This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell	The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson	White Fragility by Robin Diangelo	Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD
Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, Ashley Lukashevsky	Biased by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD	The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale	Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom	Unapologetic by Charlene A. Carruthers
White Rage by Carol Anderson, PhD	Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde	How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

 

 

To help us understand the attack on our Nation’s Capitol earlier this month, and what we can do about it, we’ve added some new recommendations to our Reading is Resistance list:

Lead from the Outside by Stacey Abrams	Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams	Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen	Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum	Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin
Hate in the Homeland by Cynthia Miller-Idriss	On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder	How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley	How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson	How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Keep scrolling to see our #readingisresistance features from past months!

READING IS RESISTANCE.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

October '21

September '21
Presumed Guilty by Erwin Chemerinsky	On Freedom by Maggie Nelson	Unbound by Tarana Burke

August '21
Breathing Fire by Jaime Lowe	Inflamed by Rupa Marya & Raj Patel	Chicago After Stonewall by St Sukie De La Croix

July '21

Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm by Robin DiAngelo With the hard-earned insights that come from years of study and leading workshops on racism, Robin DiAngelo captures the strategies often used by well-intentioned white people to avoid the self-examination needed to confront their own unrecognized racism. If you want to get beyond feeling defensive and increase your capacity for effective anti-racist action, do yourself a favor and read this book! -Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race

The Cruelty Is the Point by Adam Serwer Serwer's powerful truth-telling grabs us, shakes us, and warns us that as long as we wishfully forget the history of American cruelty, we will fail to see it coming for all that we hold dear. -Heather McGhee, author of The Sum of Us

June '21
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman	The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America by Carol Anderson	How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

May '21
On Juneteenth
by Annette Grodon-Reed

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed--herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s--forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.

Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story.

Reworking the traditional "Alamo" framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself.

In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing.
________________________________________________________

May '21
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
by Suzanne Simard

From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest--a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she's been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron's Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways--how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them--embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey--of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.
________________________________________________________

May '21
Everybody: A Book About Freedom
by Olivia Laing

PAST FEATURED TITLES

April '21
Children Under Fire: An American Crisis
by John Woodrow Cox

Based on the acclaimed series—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—an intimate account of the devastating effects of gun violence on our nation’s children, and a call to action for a new way forward

In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection—both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique. In the past decade, 15,000 children have been killed from gunfire, though that number does not account for the kids who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims but have nevertheless been irreparably harmed by gun violence.

In Children Under Fire, John Woodrow Cox investigates the effectiveness of gun safety reforms as well as efforts to manage children’s trauma in the wake of neighborhood shootings and campus massacres, from Columbine to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Through deep reporting, Cox addresses how we can effect change now, and help children like Ava and Tyshaun. He explores their stories and more, including a couple in South Carolina whose eleven-year-old son shot himself, a Republican politician fighting for gun safety laws, and the charlatans infiltrating the school safety business.

In a moment when the country is desperate to better understand and address gun violence, Children Under Fire offers a way to do just that, weaving wrenching personal stories into a critical call for the United States to embrace practical reforms that would save thousands of young lives.
________________________________________________________

April '21
On Time and Water
by Andri Snær Magnason

A few years ago, Andri Snaer Magnason, one of Iceland's most beloved writers and public intellectuals, was asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn't writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced. Magnason demurred: he wasn't a specialist, he said; it wasn't his field. But the scientist persisted: "If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context," he told him, "then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end."

Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason's response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change--and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for an iceberg to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally-minded: a travel story, a world history, and a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations. Already a massive bestseller in Iceland, and selling in two dozen territories around the world, this is a book unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
________________________________________________________

March '21
Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
by Maurice Chammah

In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country's death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction.

In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation's death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state's highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth.

Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

________________________________________________________

March '21
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
 
In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

________________________________________________________

February '21
The Devil You Know
by Charles M. Blow

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy.

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.

Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a “race book.” But as violence against Black people—both physical and psychological—seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.

So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It’s going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

________________________________________________________

January '21
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy
by Adam Jentleson

Every major decision governing our diverse, majority-female, and increasingly liberal country bears the stamp of the United States Senate, an institution controlled by people who are almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly male, and disproportionately conservative. Although they do not represent a majority of Americans—and will not for the foreseeable future—today’s Republican senators possess the power to block most legislation. Once known as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” the Senate has become one of the greatest threats to our democracy. How did this happen?

In Kill Switch, Senate insider Adam Jentleson contends that far from reflecting the Framers’ vision, the Senate has been transformed over the decades by a tenacious minority of white conservatives. From John Calhoun in the mid-1800s to Mitch McConnell in the 2010s, their primary weapon has been the filibuster, or the requirement that most legislation secure the support of a supermajority of senators. Yet, as Jentleson reveals, the filibuster was not a feature of the original Senate and, in allowing a determined minority to gridlock the federal government, runs utterly counter to the Framers’ intent.

For much of its history, the filibuster was used primarily to prevent civil rights legislation from becoming law. But more recently, Republicans have refined it into a tool for imposing their will on all issues, wielding it to thwart an increasingly progressive American majority represented by Barack Obama’s agenda and appointees. Under Donald Trump, McConnell merged the filibuster with rigid leadership structures initially forged by Lyndon Johnson, in the process surrendering the Senate’s independence and centrality, as infamously shown by its acquiescence in Trump’s impeachment trial. The result is a failed institution and a crippled democracy.

Taking us into the Capitol Hill backrooms where the institution’s decline is most evident, Jentleson shows that many of the greatest challenges of our era—partisan polarization, dark money, a media culture built on manufactured outrage—converge within the Senate. Even as he charts the larger forces that have shaped the institution where he served, Jentleson offers incisive portraits of the powerful senators who laid the foundation for the modern Senate, from Calhoun to McConnell to LBJ’s mentor, Richard Russell, to the unapologetic racist Jesse Helms.

An essential, revelatory investigation, Kill Switch ultimately makes clear that unless we immediately and drastically reform the Senate’s rules and practices—starting with reforming the filibuster—we face the prospect of permanent minority rule in America.
________________________________________________________

The Torture Letters by Laurence Ralph

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens--and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square "black site" show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents.

In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge's Area Two and follows the city's networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay--Ralph's story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it.

With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us--and lending a voice to those long deceased.

________________________________________________________

January: No One is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

The groundbreaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has become the voice of a generation, including her historic address to the United Nations.

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

________________________________________________________

December: Gods of the Upper Air by Charles King

Gods of the Upper Air is a deeply engaging collective biography and social/historical narrative, the story of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and the small band of renegade cultural anthropologists--contrarian researchers, forward thinkers, intellectual giants and scientists—who helped establish anthropology as a discipline, reject the old idea of racial hierarchies, and shape the open-minded way we think today. Led by “Papa Franz” the group included Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Gregory Bateson and Zora Neale Hurston (yes, she was an anthropologist first, a fiction writer second, doing groundbreaking fieldwork on folklore among African Americans in towns across Florida!) Charles King offers captivating, exquisitely detailed portraits of these remarkable individuals, while connecting the dots from Boas' time to ours, making it especially timely reading for our own era, helping us to better understand the historical dimensions to our country’s present situation and our society’s ready embrace of racism and intolerance. With its riveting storytelling, imaginative prose and comprehensive research, this is a truly fascinating, intellectually thrilling book, probably the most important book I’ve read all year! Ed loved and highly recommends!

________________________________________________________

November: How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

How to Hide an Empire suggests that we should think of the United States differently--not just as an association of 50 states or the contiguous portion we call the mainland, but that PLUS its overseas possessions and territories--all the islands, atolls and archipelagoes it has taken and governed over time, acknowledging our country’s imperial and colonial dimensions. “The history of the United States is the history of empire” is the premise of this book—a history of expansionism, colonies, conquest and territories, an American Empire notable for its invisibility and marked by an indifference toward the people who populate its territory (witness the treatment of the Puerto Rican people after Hurricane Maria!), and although the shape of power has changed (GLOBALIZATION has succeeded COLONIZATION), the effects of empire linger today. How to Hide an Empire is solid history, an endlessly fascinating and eye-opening account of the greater United States, including the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Northern Marianas and our current “pointillist” map of over 800 U.S. military bases around the world. Ed loved and highly recommends!

________________________________________________________

October: Whose Story Is This? On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, makes the case for a Green New Deal--explaining how bold climate action can be a blueprint for a just and thriving society.

For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet--and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices.

These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of "climate barbarism," this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink.

With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented "ecological conversion," Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis.

An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.

________________________________________________________

September: Whose Story Is This? by Rebecca Solnit

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.

“We are, as a culture, moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.”

Rebecca Solnit has already established herself as one of the most prominent contemporary writers who have helped us make sense of the mess of the world. With clarity, courage, and conviction, Solnit returns with another reliable collection of astute essays, exploring the #metoo movement, voter suppression, Christine Blasey Ford, the ownership of history and of truth, and the power of protest. Solnit has long ago moved beyond simple finger pointing and scapegoating to instead examine deeply embedded problems within our culture and our structures of power.

________________________________________________________

August: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination--and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years--because a new computer system interprets any mistake as "failure to cooperate." In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems--rather than humans--control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.
In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.
The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

________________________________________________________

July: The Stonewall Reader edited by The New York Public Library

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an anthology chronicling the tumultuous fight for LGBTQ rights in the 1960s and the activists who spearheaded it, with a foreword by Edmund White.

June 28, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots. Most importantly the anthology spotlights both iconic activists who were pivotal in the movement, such as Sylvia Rivera, co-founder of Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries (STAR), as well as forgotten figures like Ernestine Eckstein, one of the few out, African American, lesbian activists in the 1960s. The anthology focuses on the events of 1969, the five years before, and the five years after. Jason Baumann, the NYPL coordinator of humanities and LGBTQ collections, has edited and introduced the volume to coincide with the NYPL exhibition he has curated on the Stonewall uprising and gay liberation movement of 1969.

________________________________________________________

June: We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation by Matthew Riemer & Leighton Brown

A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account @lgbt_history, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Through the lenses of protest, power, and pride, We Are Everywhere is an essential and empowering introduction to the history of the fight for queer liberation. Combining exhaustively researched narrative with meticulously curated photographs, the book traces queer activism from its roots in late-nineteenth-century Europe--long before the pivotal Stonewall Riots of 1969--to the gender warriors leading the charge today. Featuring more than 300 images from more than seventy photographers and twenty archives, this inclusive and intersectional book enables us to truly see queer history unlike anything before, with glimpses of activism in the decades preceding and following Stonewall, family life, marches, protests, celebrations, mourning, and Pride. By challenging many of the assumptions that dominate mainstream LGBTQ+ history, We Are Everywhere shows readers how they can--and must--honor the queer past in order to shape our liberated future.
________________________________________________________

May: Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good edited by Adrienne Maree Brown

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life?

Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "pleasure activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects--from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs--building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.

Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and co-editor of Octavia's Brood, is a social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/healer, and a pleasure activist. She lives in Detroit.
________________________________________________________

April: An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz
From the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, a richly textured, heartrending portrait of love and death in Chicago's most turbulent neighborhoods.

Kotlowitz has been writing about Chicago for decades, and this is perhaps his most intimate and powerful work to date. Exploring one specific time in Chicago -the summer of 2013- Kotlowitz unveils a series of completely immersive, heart-wrenching portraits of those affected by Chicago gun violence. Here, pervasive poverty and systemic racism often blur the lines between offender and victim, and the book raises important questions about community, gang culture, and privilege. This is the Chicago that most Chicagoans don’t know (or choose to ignore), yet Kotlowitz proves that it is as much a part of the fabric of the city as a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Complicated, brutal, illuminating, and urgent, this is investigative journalism at its very best, a masterful work that is sure to inspire action. The writing may be Kotlowitz, but the voices contained within the book belong to those affected most by gun violence, and these voices cannot be ignored. Shane recommends! Signed copies availabe in store now!

________________________________________________________

March: She The People by Jen Deaderick, illustrated by Rita Sapunor
A sweeping, smart, and smart-ass graphic history of women's ongoing quest for equality

In March 2017, Nevada surprised the rest of America by suddenly ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment--thirty-five years after the deadline had passed. Hey, better late than never, right? Then, lo and behold, a few months later, Illinois followed suit. Hurrah for the Land of Lincoln!

That left the ERA just one state short of the congressional minimum for ratification. One state--and a legacy of shame--are what stand between American women and full equality.

She the People takes on the campaign for change by offering a cheekily illustrated, sometimes sarcastic, and all-too-true account of women's evolving rights and citizenship. Divided into twelve historical periods between 1776 and today, journalist, historian, and activist Jen Deaderick takes readers on a walk down the ERA's rocky road to become part of our Constitution by highlighting changes in the legal status of women alongside the significant cultural and social influences of the time, so women's history is revealed as an integral part of U.S. history, and not a tangential sideline.

Clever and dynamic, She the People is informative, entertaining, and a vital reminder that women stillaren't fully accepted as equal citizens in America.

________________________________________________________

 

A treatise of Black women's transformative influence in media and society, placing them front and center in a new chapter of mainstream resistance and political engagement

In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women's innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way. 

Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular--one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them. 

Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism's past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.

 

________________________________________________________

A collection of sermons and speeches that lay out a groundbreaking vision for intersectional organizing, paired with inspirational and practical essays from activists in today’s Poor People’s Campaign

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II has been called “the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst” (Cornel West) and “one of the most gifted organizers and orators in the country today” (Ari Berman). In this age of political division and civic unrest, Rev. Barber’s message is more necessary than ever. This volume features Rev. Barber’s most stirring sermons and speeches, with response essays by prominent public intellectuals, activists, and faith leaders. Drawing from the history of social movements in the US, especially the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, Rev. Barber and the contributors to this volume speak to the most pressing issues of our time, including Black Lives Matter, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the struggle to protect voting rights, the march for women’s rights, and the movement to overcome poverty and unite the dispossessed across all dividing lines. Grounded in the fundamental biblical theme of poor and oppressed people taking action together, the book suggests ways to effectively build a fusion movement to make America fair and just for everyone.

 

________________________________________________________

 

10 Best Books of the Year--Washington Post
Longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
50 Must-Read Books about American Politics--BookRiot
New York Public Library's Best Books of the Year for Nonfiction

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of White Rage, the startling--and timely--history of voter suppression in America, with a foreword by Senator Dick Durbin.

In her New York Times bestseller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.

Focusing on the aftermath of Shelby, Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

___________________________________________________________________

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.  By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.

_________________________________________________

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history.

Written in elegiac prose, Lepore’s groundbreaking investigation places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—"these truths," Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise?

These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism, and technology, from the colonial town meeting to the nineteenth-century party machine, from talk radio to twenty-first-century Internet polls, from Magna Carta to the Patriot Act, from the printing press to Facebook News.

Along the way, Lepore’s sovereign chronicle is filled with arresting sketches of both well-known and lesser-known Americans, from a parade of presidents and a rogues’ gallery of political mischief makers to the intrepid leaders of protest movements, including Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist orator; William Jennings Bryan, the three-time presidential candidate and ultimately tragic populist; Pauli Murray, the visionary civil rights strategist; and Phyllis Schlafly, the uncredited architect of modern conservatism.

Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."

___________________________________________________

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time. She explores the way emotions shape political life, electoral politics, police shootings and gentrification, the life of an extraordinary man on death row, the pipeline protest at Standing Rock, and the existential threat posed by climate change.

Now in paperback: $15.95

________________________________________________________________________

 

Reading, The Marginalized Majority, is like sitting down on the couch with our favorite bourbon and your best friend who is, let's face it, a lot more daring and insightful than you, and having one of those amazing conversations that sticks with you for the rest of your life.  Roychoudhuri knows her activist history and she has actually read Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, not just memorized a few popular quotes.  But she uses this knowledge to engage, not alienate the reader, beacuase she understands the importance of collective power, and knows that there simply isn't time for apathy or silence.  An inspiring and bold book...Shane recommends!

 

_______________________________________________________________

The Battle for Paradise: “We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?” —Carmen Yulín 

 

Never Again: On February 14, 2018, seventeen-year-old David Hogg and his fourteen-year-old sister, Lauren, went to school at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, like any normal Wednesday. That day, of course, the world changed. By the next morning, with seventeen classmates and faculty dead, they had joined the leadership of a movement to save their own lives, and the lives of all other young people in America. It's a leadership position they did not seek, and did not want--but events gave them no choice.

The morning after the massacre, David Hogg told CNN: "We're children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together. Get over your politics and get something done."

This book is a manifesto for the movement begun that day, one that has already changed America--with voices of a new generation that are speaking truth to power, and are determined to succeed where their elders have failed. With moral force and clarity, a new generation has made it clear that problems previously deemed unsolvable due to powerful lobbies and political cowardice will be theirs to solve. Born just after Columbine and raised amid seemingly endless war and routine active shooter drills, this generation now says, Enough. This book is their statement of purpose, and the story of their lives. It is the essential guide to the #NeverAgain movement.

 

________________________________________________

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

NOW IN PAPERBACK: $17.95

_________________________________________________________

Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time.

To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship.

Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

 

___________________________________________________________

In THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM, Timothy Snyder, author of the small but very successful On Tyranny, explains how democracies die when people cease to believe voting matters. The road to unfreedom is the passage from the politics of inevitability to the politics of eternity.  Snyder examines and expands this idea, and how a society descends into totalitarianism, in 6 revealing, enlightening chapters that focus on a particular year and event: 2011--the return of totalitarian thought; 2012—the collapse of democratic politics in Russia; 2013—the Russian assault on the European Union; 2014—the revolution in Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent invasion; 2015—spread of political fiction in Russia, Europe and the U.S.; 2016—the election of Donald Trump. Informative, provocative and essential reading. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!

 

 

____________________________________________________________

With the sheer abundance of new books responding to our current political crisis, it's difficult to distinguish between those that are just cashing in on the chaos versus those that are truly relevant. How Democracies Die is the latter. In it, professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt show how democracies have collapsed throughout history, creating a framework to draw parallels to the United States and Trump. They also reveal what we can learn from countries where autocracy has risen out of the ashes of democracy. This demise of democracy, they argue, rarely happens with a bang, but instead happens incrementally, and relies on the normalization of these overt and covert changes. Trump is merely a symptom and not the cause, they believe, and democracy can only survive and thrive with the active engagement and participation from its citizens. This work may be scholarly, but it is not written for academics. It's written for concerned citizens. Insightful, provocative, accessible, and sometimes downright disturbing, this book is essential for anyone looking to make sense of this mess. There are no easy answers, and this book doesn't pretend to have them. But it's a great place to start.  

 

Shane recommends!

______________________________________________________

Bestselling author and longtime Trump observer David Cay Johnston shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump Administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances, and more.

No journalist knows Donald Trump better than David Cay Johnston, who has been following him since 1988. It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America goes inside the administration to show how the federal agencies that touch the lives of all Americans are being undermined. Here is just some of what you will learn:

The Wall. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told President Trump that Mexico will never pay for the border wall. So, Trump is proposing putting a tariff on Mexican imports. But a tariff will simply raise the price of Mexican goods in the US, meaning American consumers will end up paying for the wall—if it ever gets built.

Climate Change. Welcome to the new EPA, run by Scott Pruitt, a lawyer who has spent much of his career trying to destroy the agency he now heads. Secrecy reigns at the new EPA because Pruitt meets with industry executives to find out which clean air and clean water provisions they most want to roll back, and keeps staffers in the dark to make sure these pro-pollution plans don’t leak prematurely.

Stocking the Swamp. Contrary to his promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC, Trump has filled his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires, from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs and hedge fund veteran who made much of his fortune foreclosing on homeowners to billionaire heiress Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who has already put the interests of bankers ahead of debt-burdened students and their families.

The Kleptocracy. Under Donald Trump conflict of interest is passé. When Trump isn’t in Washington, he stays at one of his properties, where the taxpayers pick up the tab for staffers, Secret Service, and so on, all at full price. And back in Washington, everyone now knows that the Trump International Hotel is the only place to stay if you want to do business with the administration. Meanwhile sons Donald Jr. and Eric run an eyes-wide-open blind trust of Trump holdings to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest—but not the reality.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

TFIH  brilliantly charts the devastating descent of a hopeful, post-Soviet Russia into totalitarianism, from Perestroika in the 1980s to the current rise of President Vladimir Putin and his new brand of autocracy (and the re-emergence of the haunting specter of "Homo Sovieticus," the gloomily obedient citizen craving authoritarianism.) In addition to this straightforward, historical account Gessen tracks the rise of totalitarianism through the lens of four individuals… a deeply personal, dramatic and engaging narrative that charts the lives of four people born at the time communism fell (including Lyosha, a homosexual academic battling an extremely intolerant, homophobic Russian society!) This intimate, unflinching look at the legacy of Stalin, the danger of nostalgia, and Russia in the post-Soviet period is brilliant, somber, urgent, alarming, riveting. At this particular moment in history it serves as a dire warning, essential reading for anyone trying to understand the earthshaking events of our time. ED LOVED and HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!

________________________________________________________________

NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY   is Suzy Hansen’s  coming-of age-travelogue/geopolitical memoir, filled with her detailed and evocative descriptions of people and places, drawing on history, her own travels and reading (including the writings of James Baldwin), trying to make sense of her own country (America) from afar (Turkey). Her book is a deeply honest and brave portrait, the tone both insistent and intimate, personal and political, anecdotal and historical. She takes us through complex histories while coming to her own personal reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world. It is a meditation on American identity in an age of American decline, on American empire, on American ignorance and naivete, and on the idea of American exceptionalism. Unsettling and remarkably revealing, NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY is the one book I wish every American would read this year!  ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS—MY FAVORITE NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR!!

_________________________________________________

Since the Great Recession, most Americans' standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality's impact differs by race; African Americans' net wealth is just a tenth that of white Americans, and over recent decades, white families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities--a dangerous combination he terms "toxic inequality." 

In Toxic Inequality, Shapiro reveals how these forces combine to trap families in place. Following nearly two hundred families of different races and income levels over a period of twelve years, Shapiro's research vividly documents the recession's toll on parents and children, the ways families use assets to manage crises and create opportunities, and the real reasons some families build wealth while others struggle in poverty. The structure of our neighborhoods, workplaces, and tax code-much more than individual choices-push some forward and hold others back. A lack of assets, far more common in families of color, can often ruin parents' careful plans for themselves and their children.

Toxic inequality may seem inexorable, but it is not inevitable. America's growing wealth gap and its yawning racial divide have been forged by history and preserved by policy, and only bold, race-conscious reforms can move us toward a more just society.

 

__________________________________________________

In The Second Amendment, Michael Waldman traced the ongoing argument on gun rights from the Bill of Rights to the current day. Now in The Fight to Vote, Michael Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at a crucial American struggle: the drive to define and defend government based on “the consent of the governed.” From the beginning, and at every step along the way, as Americans sought to right to vote, others have fought to stop them. This is the first book to trace the full story from the founders’ debates to today’s challenges: a wave of restrictive voting laws, partisan gerrymanders, the flood of campaign money unleashed by Citizens United. Americans are proud of our democracy. But today that system seems to be under siege, and the right to vote has become the fight to vote.

In fact, that fight has always been at the heart of our national story, and raucous debates over how to expand democracy have always been at the center of American politics. At first only a few property owners could vote. Over two centuries, working class white men, former slaves, women, and finally all Americans won the right to vote. The story goes well beyond voting rules to issues of class, race, political parties, and campaign corruption. It's been raw, rowdy, a fierce, and often rollicking struggle for power. Waldman’s The Fight to Vote is a compelling story of our struggle to uphold our most fundamental democratic ideals.

 

________________________________________

In designing an ideal country, high life expectancy, good health, the absence of poverty, education, democracy and the rule of law are all important, but ANGUS Deaton suggests HEALTH and WEALTH are the 2 most essential components of WELLBEING.  To measure if the world is a better place than it used to be, people should be measurably healthier (live longer) and wealthier. In THE GREAT ESCAPE, Angus Deaton take a historical/economic look at the health and wealth of nations, looking at the worldwide distribution of WELL-BEING, seeing who has made “the great escape” from destitution and who hasn’t, and where and why the “inequality gap” is widening. Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, makes the ideas of development, progress, life expectancy, health care, inequality and world poverty accessible and fascinating (even if you are not a policy wonk!), and he does this without a political agenda, making what he presents EXTREMELY IMPORTANT (essential!!) to framing the current discussion of health care in our country, without all the political noise. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!

______________________________________________

 

Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them.

 

 

______________________________________________

In Demagoguery and Democracy, Patricia Roberts-Miller does for demagoguery what Hannah Arendt did for evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She takes a familiar concept that seems straightforward and obviously detestable, and she challenges her readers to understand it for its complexity, and more importantly, to see how connected we all are to it. Demagoguery and Democracy is one of those rare books that is simultaneously approachable and complex, timely and timeless, and absolutely indispensable for understanding not just how to confront demagoguery, but also how to strengthen democracy.

 

 

________________________________________________

A small city wrenched by the worst of what a mighty recession metes out does not have a single fate; in JANESVILLE, Amy Goldstein gives us a glimpse into the individual fate of many of Janesville’s citizens when the GM auto plant closed there in 2008 at the beginning of the Great Recession. Like Barbara Ehrenreich’s NICKEL AND DIMED and George Packer’s THE UNWINDING, Goldstein goes beyond the macro, economic collapse of Janesville and introduces us to an array of characters, telling her story through the voices of factory workers, educators, business and community leaders, and politicians (notably Paul Ryan and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker). The result is fascinating, heartbreaking, and very enlightening, an indictment of our inadequate  political response to unemployment, health care, job training, and even access to food, as a community fends for itself to survive. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!

 

________________________________________________

JUST MERCY is an intense, emotional reading experience about one man’s fight against injustice in America, one that appealed to my intellect as well as my heart—I haven’t been so viscerally moved, so upset, by a book in years! Bryan Stevenson confronts head-on a criminal justice system that has proven itself brutally unfair and cruel, one that is racially biased and discriminates against the poor; through his EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE in Montgomery, Alabama, he has for years been assisting clients on death row, trying to overturn their death penalty sentences, freeing people who are wrongfully convicted, challenging excessive punishments, helping disabled prisoners, and assisting children incarcerated in the adult system. The individual stories he tells here are infuriating, riveting, shocking examples of American injustice; but Stevenson’s monumental efforts to right these wrongs, his clarity and determination, the sheer nobility of his cause, give the reader hope that justice and mercy can prevail. JUST MERCY is a brilliant book…please give it your consideration.

ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!

In Paperback: $16

________________________________________________________

Voter suppression and the right-wing/republican assault on our democracy turns out to actually be WORSE than I had imagined, as I found out reading Zachary Roth’s enlightening, well-researched and straightforward THE GREAT SUPPRESSION. The assault is real, it is well-funded, and it has been in the making for years. This book is an urgent wake-up call, a fascinating, blistering account of the concerted attempt by the right to subvert the democratic process in our country, and should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand what our voting democracy is up against, and what we need to do to save it. ED LOVED AND HIGHLY RECOMMENDS!!

 

______________________________________________________

This book is for all Americans who consider themselves part of the Resistance—people like us who wake up every day and think, “What more can I do to stop Trump?” The book offers 45 ways to stop the 45th president of the United States in his tracks, including ways to:

•Protect our culture from the degrading effects of Trump’s presidency, which rewarded bullying, sexism, racism, and xenophobia.
•Protect our communities from Trump’s personal attacks, which he and his Republican friends target at women, people of color, youth, immigrants, Jewish people, Muslims, and others.
•Fight for our values and the issues that define us—in the face of a four-year assault on racial justice, income equality, the environment, women’s rights, education, and worker’s rights.
•Build the infrastructure this movement needs (and sorely lacks), including the capacity to register and get out the vote for the 97 million Americans who didn’t cast a ballot in 2016; to find, train and promote tomorrow’s leaders; and to develop the media organizations that will report the facts and promote our values and candidates.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos, and Michael Huttner, founder of ProgressNow, have built two of the nation’s largest advocacy organizations. Now, in The Resistance Handbook: 45 Ways to Fight Trump, they offer a much-needed guide to fighting Trump and building a better, more just, and more equitable America.     (Paperback: $12.99)

______________________________________________________

In Life’s Work, an outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider (one of the few doctors to provide such services to women in Mississippi and Alabama) pulls from his personal and professional journeys as well as the scientific training he received as a doctor to reveal how he came to believe, unequivocally, that helping women in need, without judgment, is precisely the Christian thing to do.

In Life’s Work, Dr. Willie Parker tells a deeply personal and thought-provoking narrative that illuminates the complex societal, political, religious, and personal realities of abortion in the United States from the unique perspective of someone who performs them and defends the right to do so every day. He also looks at how a new wave of anti-abortion activism, aimed at making incremental changes in laws and regulations state by state, are slowly chipping away at the rights of women to control their own lives. In revealing his daily battle against mandatory waiting periods and bogus rules governing the width of hallways, Dr. Parker uncovers the growing number of strings attached to the right to choose and makes a powerful Christian case for championing reproductive rights.

 

_____________________________________________

 

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. 

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy. 

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

________________________________________________

Acclaimed journalist, activist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and “brand bullies.” From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century—the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say “no.” Our historical moment demands more: a credible and inspiring “yes,” a roadmap to reclaiming the populist ground from those who would divide us—one that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.

Paperback: $16.95

______________________________________________________________________________________`

In an incisive, thorough analysis of the current international situation, Noam Chomsky examines the way that the United States, despite the rise of Europe and Asia, still largely sets the terms of global discourse. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from the sordid history of U.S. involvement with Cuba to the sanctions on Iran, he details how America’s rhetoric of freedom and human rights so often diverges from its actions. He delves deep into the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel-Palestine, providing unexpected and nuanced insights into the workings of imperial power on our increasingly chaotic planet. And, in a new afterword, he addresses the election of Donald Trump and what it shows about American society.

Fierce, unsparing, and meticulously documented, Who Rules the World? delivers the indispensable understanding of the central issues of our time that we have come to expect from Chomsky.

Now in paperback: $18.00

__________________________________________________

We are in an age of epic political turbulence in America. Old hierarchies and institutions are collapsing. From the election of Donald Trump to the upending of the major political parties to the spread of grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter and $15 Now, people across the country and across the political spectrum are reclaiming power.  Are you ready for this age of bottom-up citizen power? Do you understand what power truly is, how it flows, who has it, and how you can claim and exercise it?  Eric Liu, who has spent a career practicing and teaching civic power, lays out the answers in this incisive, inspiring, and provocative book. Using examples from the left and the right, past and present, he reveals the core laws of power. He shows that all of us can generate power-and then, step by step, he shows us how. The strategies of reform and revolution he lays out will help every reader make sense of our world today. If you want to be more than a spectator in this new era, you need to read this book.

 

 

__________________________________________________

In Rules for Resistance, writers from Russia, Turkey, India, Hungary, Chile, China, Canada, Italy, and elsewhere tell Americans what to expect under our own new regime, and give us guidance for living—and for resisting—in the Trump era.  Advice includes being on the watch for the prosecution of political opponents, the use of libel laws to attack critics, the gutting of non-partisan institutions, and the selective application of the law.

In paperback: $15.95

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

 Enter Donald J Trump and his team of advisors.  For them, as Gladstone writes, lying is the point.  The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth.  Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy out of the authoritarian playbook and shows how the Trump team mastered it.  She analyzes Trump tweets including the "diversion tweet," the "trial ballloon tweet," and the "deflection tweet."

And she offers hope--the inevitable reckoning history tells us we count on--and a way to recover both our belief in reality and our sanity.  NOW IN PAPERBACK $8.95

 

 

______________________________________________

Radical Hope is a collection of letters—to ancestors, to children five generations from now, to strangers in grocery lines, to any and all who feel weary and discouraged—written by award-winning novelists, poets, political thinkers, and activists. Provocative and inspiring, Radical Hope offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of the love and courage needed to navigate this time of upheaval, uncertainty, and fear, in view of the recent US presidential election.

 

 

_________________________________________________________

 

In this “thought-provoking and important” (Library Journal) analysis of state-sanctioned violence, Marc Lamont Hill carefully considers a string of high-profile deaths in America—Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others—and incidents of gross negligence by government, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. He digs underneath these events to uncover patterns and policies of authority that allow some citizens become disempowered, disenfranchised, poor, uneducated, exploited, vulnerable, and disposable. To help us understand the plight of vulnerable communities, he examines the effects of unfettered capitalism, mass incarceration, and political power while urging us to consider a new world in which everyone has a chance to become somebody. Heralded as an essential text for our times, Marc Lamont Hill’s galvanizing work embodies the best traditions of scholarship, journalism, and storytelling to lift unheard voices and to address the necessary question, “how did we get here?"

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________

 

In the face of widespread fear and apathy, an international coalition of researchers, professionals, and scientists have come together to offer a set of realistic and bold solutions to climate change. One hundred techniques and practices are described here—some are well known; some you may have never heard of. They range from clean energy to educating girls in lower-income countries to land use practices that pull carbon out of the air. The solutions exist, are economically viable, and communities throughout the world are currently enacting them with skill and determination. If deployed collectively on a global scale over the next thirty years, they represent a credible path forward, not just to slow the earth’s warming but to reach drawdown, that point in time when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and begin to decline. These measures promise cascading benefits to human health, security, prosperity, and well-being—giving us every reason to see this planetary crisis as an opportunity to create a just and livable world

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________________
Ed loved this practical, inspirational book that is both a memoir and an activist handbook. Reverend Barber is involved in the struggle for justice in North Carolina, at the forefront of the resistance, building a new justice movement with a fusion coalition of people committed to America’s third reconstruction (the first was after the civil war; the second was the civil rights movement of the 60’s), following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, jr.  He organizes and mobilizes for collective action, taking a stand AGAINST systemic injustice in America: the wealth divide, the legacy of slavery, racism, militarism, homophobia. He believes in a moral movement toward justice (that also includes non-religious people), fighting FOR workers’ rights, voting rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and women’s access to healthcare with FUSION COALITIONS that are “radically inclusive”, pursuing “militantly pro-labor, pro-justice, anti-racist, anti-poverty solutions.” The Third Reconstruction reads as a primer on how to successfully fight the radical right, including a 14-point mobilization plan. Ed highly recommends!!

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________

THE NASTY WOMEN PROJECT is an invaluable collection of heartfelt and courageous voices from American women that is sure to rouse and inspire. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to Planned Parenthood!

 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________

Today, with economic inequality rising, the middle class collapsing, and power increasingly concentrated in the hands of economic elites, our middle-class constitution is at risk. Steps must be taken to preserve middle-class America or the united states will cease to be a democracy, says Vanderbilt law professor (and former Elizabeth Warren policy director) Ganesh Sitaraman, author of The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. This provocative, compelling, even thrilling book, fusing political philosophy, history and economics, gives a historical context to our present problem: the collapse of the middle class, the number one threat to American constitutional government today.  If we want to preserve our republic, the only sustainable answer is to rebuild our middle class; this important book is a monumental achievement providing a bold, historic vision that can ignite our collective imagination and frame the debate about solutions. Ed loved and highly recommends.

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________________

ON TYRANNY is a small, succint primer listing "twenty lessons from the twentieth century" to consider when contemplating our current, imperiled political order.  The book's message: It CAN happen here but we CAN prevent it.  We need more writers like Timothy Snyder, and more discerning readers to engage in the political act of reading books like this!

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________

A COLONY IN A NATION is a welcome addition to the current literature dealing with racial inequality, privilege, and the American Criminal Justice System. Hayes argues that there are really two Americas- a nation, where Americans are treated as citizens, and a colony, where people are treated as colonized and where policing resembles   occupation. His brilliantly argued critique of “white fear” is essential reading, and Hayes helps reframe our thinking on the politics of American crime and punishment. A compelling, urgent read!

 

 

___________________________________________________

 

TEARS WE CANNOT STOP is a powerful work of cultural analysis.  It is a cry from the heart, a lament, an urgent book in the vein of James Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME and Martin Luther King's WHY WE CAN'T WAIT, told with righteous anger and unflinching honesty.  It is moving, challenging, sometimes uncomfortable and provocative, covering the ideas of white privilege, the culture of whiteness, the power of language, black subjugation, the myth of white history as American history, and personal reparations, complete with an amazing reading list to encourage further learning.  Read and be prepared to be changed.

 

 

________________________________________________________________________________________

HOPE IN THE DARK is Rebecca Solnit’s rallying cry for activism, her well thought-out, well-argued case for hope in transforming society.  Martin Luther King spoke of an “infinite hope,” and Solnit explains its importance and how to maintain it, not as a substitute for action, but as a prerequisite for it.  Howard Zinn said the “struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the over-whelming power of those wo have the guns and money,” and Solnit argues that to maintain in hope is the opposite of powerlessness, that resistance begins in the imagination, that hope generates struggle which generates more hope, that hope is a rejection of inaction and defeatism, that hope sustains activism.  This is truly an important book for our times!

 

 

_____________________________________________________

DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE! asks you to close your eyes for a moment and think creatively about what a better world might look like, ask “what if?” and question received wisdom; then grow these questions into calls to action, into creating alternatives, into challenging profit-driven systems everywhere, into “getting busy with projects of reframing and repair, movement making, agitating, educating, and community organizing.” 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________

 

THE FIRE NEXT TIME is a brilliant, searing, intensely personal document, written in the form of a letter (2 letters, actually,1 short and 1 much longer) that gives voice to the disturbing/ongoing consequences of racial injustice in America.  Full of passion and eloquence, it is especially relevant today some 50 years after its initial 1963 publication.  It is an indictment of, and an exhortation to address, racism’s terrible legacy, and the continued enslavement of black people in America, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. 

 

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

DARK MONEY is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.  It emerges as an impressively reported and well-documented work. The importance of DARK MONEY flows from its scope and perspective. It is not easy to uncover the inner workings of an essentially secretive political establishment. Mayer has come as close to doing it as anyone is likely to come anytime soon.

 

 

 

_________________________________________________

FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE is an incisive, urgent, and comprehensive understanding of systematic racism, the grounds for intersectional analysis and solidarity, and the importance of working together as equals to unmask and depose systems of injustice. This wide-ranging and brilliant set of essays includes a trenchant analysis of police violence against people of color, of the systematic incarceration of black people in America, the grounds of Palestinian solidarity for the Left, the affirmation of transgender inclusion, and the necessity of opposing the G4S corporation and its high-profit empire dedicated to the institutionalization of racism in the name of security. 

 

 

___________________________________________________________

 BEAUTIFUL TROUBLE brings together dozens of seasoned artists and activists from around the world to distill their best practices into a toolbox for creative action. Sophisticated enough for veteran activists, accessible enough for newbies, this compendium of troublemaking wisdom is a must-have for aspiring changemakers. Showcasing the synergies between artistic imagination and shrewd political strategy, Beautiful Trouble is for everyone who longs for a more beautiful, more just, more livable world – and wants to know how to get there.

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

 

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government in our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination.

 

 

__________________________________________________

RULES FOR RADICALS is Saul Alinsky's impassioned counsel to young radicals on how to effect constructive social change and know “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.” Written in the midst of radical political developments whose direction Alinsky was one of the first to question, this volume exhibits his style at its best. Like Thomas Paine before him, Alinsky was able to combine, both in his person and his writing, the intensity of political engagement with an absolute insistence on rational political discourse and adherence to the American democratic tradition.

 

 

 

__________________________________________________

WHAT WE DO NOW is a collection of passionate manifestos by some of the country's leading progressives, aims to provide a blueprint for how those stunned progressives can move forward. Its powerful contributions -- from economists, environmentalists, activists, artists, politicians, and novelists -- will offer encouragement and guidance to practicing constitutionally protected acts of resistance throughout the unprecedented upcoming administration.

 

 

_____________________________________________________________

 

THE TRUMP SURVIVAL GUIDE, by Gene Stone, offers invaluable guidance and concrete solutions they can use to make a difference in this serious call-to-arms—showing them how to move from anger and despair to activism as the Trump presidency is in full swing and he signs one executive order after another.  While marches and social media are important forms of protest, concrete actions achieve real change. Positive and reinforcing, The Trump Survival Guide presents the essential information we need to effectively make our voices heard and our power felt.