New at the Library

Description: How do people who love animals translate that devotion into helping creatures who are not our pets? How do we express our care for animals when that means different things to omnivores and vegetarians–or, say, to hunters and non-hunters? Barbara J. King, a widely read expert on animal cognition and emotion, here guides readers through the difficult choices and deep rewards of turning empathy into action on behalf of animals. King discusses our relationship to animals in five different contexts: our homes, the wild, zoos, our food system, and research facilities such as biomedical laboratories. She offers a host of ways in which each of us can be better, and do better, for animals. Acting to improve animals' lives can, she shows, immeasurably enrich our own. True, there is also heartache and the risk of burnout from endlessness of animal rescue and the dilemmas that attend it. But King’s focus is on the joys. She describes the “happiness lift” that she herself has experienced joining with other activists on behalf of animals destined for slaughter or confined in sub-standard zoos-and in rescuing dozens of cats, some of whom we meet in this book. This is a book for anyone who cares for animals and wishes to do more for them, whether it’s learning to live peaceably with spiders in the home or join with others to rescue our more dramatically endangered animal friends. (publ.)

Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the founding fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive--and racist--domestic forces.

Reviewed: PW 18 May 2020 p. 55.
Description: Reconciliation is not true reconciliation without justice! Brenda Salter McNeil has come to this conviction as she has led the church in pursuing reconciliation efforts over the past three decades. McNeil calls the church to repair the old reconciliation paradigm by moving beyond individual racism to address systemic injustice, both historical and present. It’s time for the church to go beyond individual reconciliation and “heart change” and to boldly mature in its response to racial division. Looking through the lens of the biblical narrative of Esther, McNeil challenges Christian reconcilers to recognize the particular pain in our world so they can work together to repair what is broken while maintaining a deep hope in God's ongoing work for justice. This book provides education and prophetic inspiration for every person who wants to take reconciliation seriously. It offers a distinctly Christian framework for addressing systemic injustice. It challenges Christians to be everyday activists who become brave enough to break the silence and work with others to dismantle systems of injustice and inequality. (publ.)

Description: Anger has a bad reputation. Many people think that it is counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. It is a negative emotion, many believe, because it can lead so quickly to violence or an overwhelming fury. And coming from people of color, it takes on connotations that are even more sinister, stirring up stereotypes, making white people fear what an angry other might be capable of doing, when angry, and leading them to turn to hatred or violence in turn, to squelch an anger that might upset the racial status quo. According to philosopher Myisha Cherry, anger does not deserve its bad reputation. … People fear anger because they paint it in broad strokes, but we can’t dismiss all anger, especially not now. There is a form of anger that in fact is crucial in the anti-racist struggle today. … Cherry makes her argument for anti-racist anger by putting Aristotle in conversation with Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin in conversation with Joseph Butler. She not only uses the tools of philosophy to articulate its arguments, but it sharpens them with the help of social psychology and history. The book is philosophically rich and yet highly accessible beyond philosophical spheres, issuing an urgent call to all politically and socially engaged readers looking for new, deeply effective tools for changing the world. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 19 Apr. 2021 p. 74.
Description: Born in China’s north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the Chinese authorities incarcerated her. Her crime: being Kazakh, one of the China’s ethnic minorities. The north-western province borders the largest number of foreign nations and is the point in China that is the closest to Europe. In recent years it has become home to over 1,200 penal camps–modern-day gulags that are estimated to house three million members of the Kazakh and Uyghur minorities. Imprisoned solely due to their ethnicity, inmates are subjected to relentless punishment and torture, including being beaten, raped, and used as subjects for medical experiments. The camps represent the greatest systematic incarceration of an entire people since the Third Reich.
Author Note: Sayragul Sauytbay was awarded the 2021 Nuremberg International Human Rights Award, and the US State Department’s International Women of Courage Award in 2020.

To be human is to be biased. From this simple truth, nationally recognized diversity expert Howard J. Ross explores the biases we each carry within us. Incorporating anecdotes from today's headlines alongside case studies from over 30 years of diversity consulting, Ross helps readers understand how unconscious bias impacts our day-to-day lives and, particularly, our daily work lives. And, he answers the question: "Is there anything we can do about it?" by providing examples of behaviors that the reader can engage in to disengage the impact of their own biases. Originally published in 2014, the updated edition draws new examples from today's headlines such as the #me too Movement, police shootings, and bias in the ever more partisan Trump era.

Reviewed: PW 28 Mar. 2022 p. 59; NYT/BR 19 June 2022 p. 14.
Description: This biography of George Floyd shows the athletic young boy raised in the projects of Houston's Third Ward who would become a father, a partner, a friend, and a man constantly in search of a better life. In retracing Floyd’s story, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa bring to light the determination Floyd carried as he faced the relentless struggle to survive as a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the larger context of America’s deeply troubled history of institutional racism, His Name Is George Floyd examines the Floyd family's roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his Houston schools, the overpolicing of his communities, the devastating snares of the prison system, and his attempts to break free from drug dependence–putting today’s inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and extensive original reporting, Samuels and Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 7 Feb. 2022 p. 50.
Description: A bold new assessment of the multipronged attack on American rights, and how to push back, from experts at the Fletcher School at Tufts and the Carr Center at Harvard. In fifteen accessible chapters dealing with voting rights, freedom of speech, criminal justice, gun rights, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, religious freedom, privacy, immigration, and more, three renowned thought-leaders, including a former assistant secretary of state, John Shattuck, Sushma Raman, and Mathias Risse present a comprehensive account of the current state of rights in America-along with concrete recommendations to policy makers and citizens for reimagining them. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 18 Apr. 2021 p. 26; PW 4 Jan. 2021 p. 43.
Description: Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting–reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them. As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach … he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination–and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court–did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces readers to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Reviewed: PW 23 Nov. 2021 p. 51.
Description: Drawing from fields such as media studies, literary studies, history, sociology, film studies, and music studies, this book engages in an interdisciplinary analysis of the how the streets have shaped contemporary perceptions of black identity, community, violence, spending habits, and belonging. Where historical and sociological research has examined these realities regarding economic and social disparities, this book analyzes the streets through the lens of marketing campaigns, literature, hip-hop, film, and television in order to better understand the cultural meanings associated with the streets. Because these media represent a terrain of cultural contestation, they illustrate the way the meaning of the streets has been shaped by both the white and black imaginaries as well as how they have served as a site of self-assertion and determination for black communities.

Reviewed: PW 23 Nov. 2020 p. 43.
Description: Despite the extensive coverage in the U.S. media of the southern border and Donald Trump’s proposed wall, most English speakers have had little access to the multitude of perspectives from Mexico on the ongoing crisis. Boullosa and Quintero redress this imbalance with this collection of essays, translated into English for the first time, drawing on writing by journalists, novelists, and documentary-makers who are Mexican or based in Mexico. They discuss important questions, including the history of U.S.-Mexican relations, and questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and borders. (publ.)

WINNER OF THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2020 'This is the story of arguably one of the most important, yet least known, events in modern British history. Lee's journey and fight for justice are both inspiring and enraging' AKALA What would you do if the people you trusted to uphold the law committed a crime against you? Who would you turn to? And how long would you fight them for? On 28th September 1985, Lee Lawrence's mother Cherry Groce was wrongly shot by police during a raid on her Brixton home. The bullet shattered her spine and she never walked again. In the chaos that followed, 11-year-old Lee watched in horror as the News falsely pronounced his mother dead. In Brixton, already a powder keg because of the deep racism that the community was experiencing, it was the spark needed to trigger two days of rioting that saw buildings brought down by petrol bombs, cars torched and shops looted. But for Lee, it was a spark that lit a flame that would burn for the next 30 years as he fought to get the police to recognise their wrongdoing. His life had changed forever: he was now his mother's carer, he had seen first-hand the prejudice that existed in his country, and he was at the mercy of a society that was working against him. And yet that flame - for justice, for peace, for change - kept him going. The Louder I Will Sing is a powerful, compelling and uplifting memoir about growing up in modern Britain as a young Black man. It's a story both of people and politics, of the underlying racism beneath many of our most important institutions, but also the positive power that hope, faith and love can bring in response.

This eye-opening book challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases, and helps white people take action and dismantle the privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.

Description: When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century–but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that anti-monument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and “heritage” laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 28 Mar. 2022 p. 56.
Description: As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis. Born in 1970 in a reeducation camp, he was lucky enough to survive and eventually make his way to the US, where he became the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree. Since then, he has worked as a prominent lawyer, activist, and spokesperson for his people and advocated strong policy responses from the liberal democracies to address atrocity crimes against his people. The Uyghur crisis is turning into the greatest human rights crisis of the twenty-first century, a systematic cleansing of an entire race of people in the millions. … In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million Uyghurs, placing them in what it calls “reeducation camps,” facilities most of the world identifies as concentration camps. There, the genocide and enslavement of the Uyghur people are ongoing. The tactics employed are reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, but the results are far more insidious because of the technology used, most of it stolen from Silicon Valley. In the words of Turkel, “Communist China has created an open prison-like environment through the most intrusive surveillance state that the world has ever known while committing genocide and enslaving the Uyghurs on the world’s watch.” (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 19 June 2020 p. 28.
Description: 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. This book brings us Greta in her own words alongside moving images from her game-changing protests. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to 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.

Reviewed: NYT 13 Feb. 2022 p. SR2 (excerpt/op-ed); NYT/BR 13 Mar. 2022 p. 10; NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2022 (100 Notable Books of 2022); PW 13 Dec. 2021 p. 63.
Description: We tend to think of revolutions as loud: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas fueling them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate over how to get there. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, over centuries and across continents, and a warning that-in a world dominated by social media-they might soon go extinct. Gal Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, takes us back to the seventeenth century, to the correspondence that jumpstarted the scientific revolution, and then forward through time to examine the engines of social change: the petitions that secured the right to vote in 1830s Britain, the zines that gave voice to women’s rage in the early 1990s, even the messaging apps used by epidemiologists fighting the pandemic in the shadow of an inept administration. In each case, Beckerman shows that our most defining social movements–from decolonization to feminism–were formed in quiet, closed networks that allowed a small group to incubate their ideas before broadcasting them widely. But Facebook and Twitter are replacing these productive, private spaces, to the detriment of activists around the world. Why did the Arab Spring fall apart? Why did Occupy Wall Street never gain traction? Has Black Lives Matter lived up to its full potential? Beckerman reveals what this new social media ecosystem lacks-everything from patience to focus-and offers a recipe for growing radical ideas again. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 24 Apr. 2022 p. SR3 (referenced); PW 19 July 2021 p. 201.
Description: Drawing upon 25 years of experience representing black youth in Washington D.C.’s juvenile court, Kris Henning confronts America’s irrational, manufactured fears of Black youth and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. She explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and details the long-term consequences of racism and trauma Black youth experience at the hands of police and their vigilante surrogates. She makes clear that unlike white youth who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries, experiment with sex and drugs, and figure out who they are and want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to white America and are denied healthy adolescent development. She examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, and of Black fashion, hair and music. She limns the effects of police presence in schools, and the depth of policing-induced trauma in Black adolescents. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 7 Nov. 2021 p. 14.
Description: Historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain situates Fannie Lou Hamer as a key political thinker alongside leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks and demonstrates how her ideas remain salient for a new generation of activists committed to dismantling systems of oppression in the United States and across the globe. Despite her limited material resources and the myriad challenges she endured as a Black woman living in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer committed herself to making a difference in the lives of others. She refused to be sidelined in the movement and refused to be intimidated by those of higher social status and with better jobs and education. In these pages, Hamer’s words and ideas take center stage, allowing us all to hear the activist’s voice and deeply engage her words, as though we had the privilege to sit right beside her. More than 40 years since Hamer’s death in 1977, her words still speak truth to power, laying bare the faults in American society and offering valuable insights on how we might yet continue the fight to help the nation live up to its core ideals of “equality and justice for all.”

Reviewed: NYT 27 Mar. 2022 p. 36 (referenced)
Description: Conversations about education in America focus near-exclusively on underprivileged, majority-minority schools for many important reasons. This book, however, argues that such efforts cannot succeed in creating a more just and equitable society without also addressing the students who benefit from America’s educational, economic and racial inequities. These young people grow up to wield disproportionate power and influence, yet emerge undereducated and poorly prepared to navigate, let alone shape, our increasingly diverse country. David Nurenberg weaves together narrative from his twenty years of suburban teaching with relevant research in education and critical race theory to provide practical, hands-on strategies for educators dealing with challenges unique to high-powered suburban, urban and independent schools: affluent myopia, white fragility, the empathy gap, overinvolved parents, overcautious administrators and an “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Despite high test scores and college acceptances, many schools serving affluent white students are indeed broken. Social justice education for privileged white students is not only critical for our society, but also for helping those students themselves emerge from a culture of anxiety and cynicism to find meaning, purpose and self-confidence as activist allies. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 Nov. 2020 p. 36.
Description: Your good intentions used to be enough. But in these diverse and divisive times, some people would hold you accountable for your actions. You were not raised for such unfairness. You need help. And help you now have. Let Daquan–that black coworker you are referring to when you claim to have black friends–help you navigate perilous small talk with African Americans with this handy field guide. This portable bit of emotional labor puts at your fingertips a tabbed and alphabetized list of things not to say to black people. Finally! How to use: Keep this handbook close. Whenever you are confronted with an African American and you feel compelled to blurt out an observation about her hair or to liken your Tesla lease to slavery, ask for a moment to consult this reference. She’ll wait. If the keen insight you want to share is listed herein, You Can Keep That to Yourself. It truly is that easy!

Reviewed: PW 24 Aug. 2020 p. 70.
Description: “You may think the right to vote is a small matter, and if you do, I would bet you have never had it taken away from you.” Thus begins the story of Desmond Meade and his inspiring journey to restore voting rights to roughly 1.4 million returning citizens in Florida–resulting in a stunning victory in 2018 that enfranchised the most people at once in any single initiative since women’s suffrage. This is the deeply moving, personal story of Meade’s life, his political activism, and the movement he spearheaded to restore voting rights to returning citizens who had served their terms. Meade survived a tough childhood only to find himself with a felony conviction. Finding the strength to pull his life together, he graduated summa cum laude from college, graduated from law school, and married. But because of his conviction, he was not even allowed to sit for the bar exam in Florida. And when his wife ran for state office, he was filled with pride–but not permitted to vote for her. Meade takes us on a journey from his time in homeless shelters, to the exhilarating, joyful night in November of 2018, when Amendment 4 passed with 65 percent of the vote. Meade’s story, and his commitment to a fully enfranchised nation, will prove to readers that one person really can make a difference. (publ.)

Description: parked by revelations of decades of sexual harassment by powerful Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, the movement quickly uncovered similar abusive behavior by numerous other famous public figures. It also revealed the extent to which sexual harassment has been a persistent problem in many workplace settings across America and the ways in which girls and women are subjected to degrading and discriminatory treatment because of their gender. The book provides a broad perspective on these issues. It discusses late twentieth-century efforts to identify sexual harassment as a longstanding societal problem; explains how the 2016 presidential election brought new attention to this issue; introduces activists who helped to launch the #MeToo Movement; and surveys the impact of the movement on American politics, business, and entertainment. (publ.)

Description: #MeToo gained much-needed traction when celebrities began sharing their horrifying experiences in an effort to bring down a powerful studio mogul. Revelations of sexual harassment are often met with smearing and victim blaming, but many believe the Hollywood spotlight has a real chance of effecting change. Still, many feel threatened by this movement. Has #MeToo gone too far? Is its mission clear? Has it failed to include more marginalized groups? Will it be abandoned when Hollywood moves on to its next cause? This volume presents diverse viewpoints that unpack the goals, triumphs, and shortcomings of this relatively young movement.
Note: Library standing order

Description: While Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests reignited the debate surrounding athletes and political activism, the relationship between the two is a longstanding tradition. The athletic field has long been a site for protests against racism, hosting key events in the fight for equality, such as legendary African American baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1947 induction into the MLB. Recent protests have expanded to issues like sexism, LGBT rights, and immigration, and have made use of social media and other modern developments. This volume examines the controversies surrounding athlete activism as well as its place in history and contemporary politics. (publ.)
Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: PW 25 Feb. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Pastor and activist James E. Atwood issues an urgent call to action to Christians to work together to stop gun violence. An avid hunter for many years, Atwood enumerates the tragic and far-reaching costs that accrue in a country with more guns than people. He includes a generalized fear and loss of trust. Suicides and homicides. Trauma for children in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence and in schools with frequent lockdown drills. A toxic machismo that shapes our boys and men in unhealthy ways. Economic costs that exceed $229 billion per year. Atwood also considers the deeper story of racism, inequality, and mass incarceration in which the conversation about gun violence is lodged. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 11 Nov. 2019 p. 51.
Description: For decades, intractable social and economic problems have been eating away at the social fabric of the United States. The crisis is now so deep it’s threatening democracy. Income inequality has reached epic proportions, resulting in a lopsided political system that bestows tax breaks on the rich while the rest of the country has been economically abandoned. There’s a single, obvious solution to these problems, one with a long, successful history, but one that too many have forgotten: unions. Longtime labor, environmental, and political organizer Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are the only institution capable of fighting back against today's super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions briefly flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. Today, McAlevey argues, it's time for unions to make a comeback. Want to reverse the nation’s mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions. Alongside McAlevey, we travel from Pennsylvania hospitals, where we’re thrust into a herculean fight in which nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism; to Silicon Valley, where tech workers, fed up with the illusory promise of a better world, have turned to old-fashioned collective action; and inside the most promising anti-austerity rebellion in years, the one be-ing waged by America’s teachers. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 Feb. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Young people are suffering the most from the epidemic of gun violence—as early as kindergarten students are crouching behind locked doors during active shooter drills. Teens are galvanizing to speak up and fight for their right to be safe. They don’t just want to get involved, they want to change the world. … This handbook deftly explains America’s gun violence issues–myths and facts, causes and perpetrators, solutions and change-makers–and provides a road map for effective activism. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 80.
Description: In this gripping narrative told from multiple perspectives of the survivors and families of the victims, Maldonado relives the events leading up to and during the horrific assaults in which 43 students were brutalized at the hands of police and militarized narco-gang members, then vanished without a trace. Now, four years later–when many of the fallen would have graduated–despite ongoing investigations from international human rights organizations, the violence that took place that night remains as yet unexplained, nor has anyone been held accountable. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 Feb. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Shannon Watts was a stay-at-home mom folding laundry when news broke of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. In one moment, she went from outraged to engaged and decided to do something about it. What started as a simple Facebook group to connect with other frustrated parents grew into Moms Demand Action, a national movement with mil-lions of supporters and a powerful grassroots network of local chapters in all 50 states. Shannon has been called “the NRA’s Worst Nightmare”–and her army of moms have bravely gone up against the gun lobby, showing up in their signature red shirts, blocking the hallways of congress with their strollers, electing gun sense candidates and running for office themselves, and proving that if the 80 million moms in this country come together, they can put an end to gun violence. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 93; NYT/BR 29 Sept. 2019 p. 9; NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019"); PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 30 (Best Books 2019); TLS 7 Feb. 2020 p. 27.
Description: Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America—but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In this book, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. He weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 24 Feb. 2020 p. 63.
Description: As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. His commitment to reforming the justice system and making America a more equitable place has brought challenges and triumphs, soaring victories and crushing defeats. Throughout his wide-ranging activism, King’s commentary remains rooted in both exhaustive research and abundant passion. He offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. (publ.)

Description: This volume is devoted to the NFL national anthem protests, which have triggered both fierce condemnation and spirited defenses since August 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the anthem to bring attention to the issues of social injustice and police brutality. NFL National Anthem Protests not only surveys the events that led to Kaepernick’s decision but also traces the fallout from that choice–the decision by other players to join him, the angry response from some NFL fans and President Trump himself, and the frantic efforts of the league to keep the controversy from consuming the NFL. The book also uses those events and responses as a vehicle for deeper examinations of all of the issues they have raised, including the nature of peaceful protest, the place of the flag in American life, the constitutional parameters of free speech, and the facts about police brutality and racial discrimination in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 28 June 2019 p. 26; NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 85.
Description: In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile. (publ.)
Note: Originally published: Sidney, NSW: Picador, 2018.

Description: Honigsberg conducted 158 interviews across 20 countries so that the people who lived and worked there could tell their heartbreaking and inspirational stories. In each one, we face the reality that the healing process cannot begin until we start the conversation about what was done in the name of protecting our country. These are a few of them. Many alleged operatives in Guantánamo were purchased by the United States for ransom from Afghan and Pakistani soldiers. Brandon Neely, a prison guard who processed the first group of suspected operatives to arrive in Cuba, flew to London to embrace the detainees he guarded after leaving the military. Navy whistleblower Matt Diaz covertly released the names of 500 detainees by sending them in a greeting card to a lawyer in New York. Journalist Carol Rosenberg committed the past 17 years of her career to documenting life at Guantánamo. And Damien Corsetti, an interrogator who came to be known as the “King of Torture,” received ribbons and awards for the same cruel actions for which he was later prosecuted. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.
Description: The United States has had an active history of public protest since colonial times, with the Boston Tea Party serving as an emblematic example to this day. Protest in the United States is often associated with its zenith in the 1960s, but demonstrations of public outrage continue to play a major role in contemporary America, with notable recent examples ranging from the Women’s March to Black Lives Matter protests. Through this volume’s dynamic viewpoints, readers will gain a better understanding of the history of public protest, its differing manifestations, and its efficacy in promoting political and social change. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 7 Nov. 2019 p. C8.
Description: Offers a ... chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Oct. 2019 p. 48; PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 32 (Best Books 2019).
Description: For many years, reporters had tried to get to the truth about Harvey Weinstein’s treatment of women. Rumors of wrongdoing had long circulat-ed. But in 2017, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey began their investi-gation into the prominent Hollywood producer for the New York Times, his name was still synonymous with power. During months of confidential in-terviews with top actresses, former Weinstein employees, and other sources, many disturbing and long-buried allegations were unearthed, and a web of onerous secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements was re-vealed. These shadowy settlements had long been used to hide sexual harassment and abuse, but with a breakthrough reporting technique Kan-tor and Twohey helped to expose it. But Weinstein had evaded scrutiny in the past, and he was not going down without a fight. He employed a team of high-profile lawyers, private investigators, and other allies to thwart the investigation. When Kantor and Twohey were finally able to convince some sources to go on the record, a dramatic final showdown between Weinstein and the New York Times was set in motion. Nothing could have prepared Kantor and Twohey for what followed the publication of their initial Weinstein story on October 5, 2017. Within days, a veritable Pandora’s box of sexual harassment and abuse was opened. Women all over the world came forward with their own traumatic stories. Over the next twelve months, hundreds of men from every walk of life and industry were outed following allegations of wrongdoing. But did too much change–or not enough? Those questions hung in the air months later as Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, and Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify that he had assaulted her decades earlier. Kantor and Twohey, who had unique access to Ford and her team, bring to light the odyssey that led her to come forward, the overwhelming forces that came to bear on her, and what happened after she shared her allegation with the world. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 14 June 2019 p. 31; TLS 29 Nov. 2019 p. 12--2019 Book of the Year.
Description: Several million refugees and migrants set out for Europe from 2014 to 2018, spurred by war and chaos in Syria and Iraq, violence in Afghanistan, and hopelessness in countries bordering war zones. In 2015 and 2016 the western Balkans, from Turkey through Greece, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, was their main entry point. As a BBC correspondent based in Budapest for more than three decades, Nick Thorpe was perfectly placed to cover the birth of the route, its heyday, and the attempts of numerous states to close it ever since. This is his intimate portrait of the daily lives of those stuck in razor-wire enclosures or on the move, along forest tracks, railway lines, motorways–and of the smugglers, border police and political leaders who help, exploit or obstruct them. In this eye-opening account, Thorpe challenges those who demonise or glorify migration, visits their arrivals in their new environment, and studies their impact on the countries that welcomed them with open arms or with hesitations. (publ.) “…Time and again, Thorpe is invited to eat with his interviewees, people who have lost everything but their dignity; illustrated by their willingness to share what little they have left.” (TLS)

Description: A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews over the course of more than one year of reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland, and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the response to Michael Brown’s death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown’s family and the families of other victims as well as local activists. By posing the question “What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?” Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and too few jobs. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 98(2) Sept./Oct. 2019 p. 236.
Description: Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post-World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. (publ.)

Description: This provides readers with an in-depth exploration of not only the topic of voter suppression, but how public opinion influenced action on voters’ rights, from the founding of the country, when most states limited the right to vote to property-owning males, to the establishment in 2017 of the Presidential Advisory Commission of Election Integrity, and beyond, to how voter suppression efforts affected the 2018 elections. This edition starts with a detailed Introduction that highlights the important topics that have shaped the right to vote in the United States. A comprehensive timeline follows, highlighting significant events in voter enfranchisement from the first vote held in 1607 in the New World to elect a leader of the Virginia Colony to the 2019 delay in North Carolina to implement voter ID requirements. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 8 Mar. 2020 p. 22.
Description: America is the greatest democracy in the world . . . isn’t it? Author Elizabeth Rusch examines some of the more problematic aspects of our government but, more importantly, offers ways for young people to fix them. The political landscape has never been so tumultuous: issues with the electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a lack of representation in the polls and in our leadership have led to Americans of all ages asking, How did we get here? The power to change lies with the citizens of this great country–especially teens! Rather than pointing fingers at people and political parties, this book looks at flaws in the system–and offers a real way out of the mess we are in. (publ.)

Description: Antifa has received public attention since the election of President Trump. To some, this was believed to represent the rise of white supremacy and authoritarianism in the United States, which Antifa made it a point to combat at any cost. What exactly is the Antifa movement? Are its militant, sometimes violent attempts to combat fascism justified, or are they just as morally reprehensible as what they are reacting against? This volume looks at Antifa’s place in American and international history, as well as its organization, goals, and ethical implications, offering a clearer look at this enigmatic movement. (publ.)
Note: Standing Order.

Reviewed: PW 24 Dec. 2018 p. 58.
Description: Parkland. Las Vegas. Dallas. Orlando. San Bernardino. Paris. Charleston. Sutherland Springs. Newtown. These cities are now known for the people who were shot and killed in them. More Americans have died from guns in the US in the last fifty years than in all the wars in American history. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the people of the US own nearly half the world’s guns. America also has the most annual gun deaths–homicide, suicide, and accidental gun deaths–at 105 per day, or more than 38,000 per year. … This book is for people who believe the world doesn’t have to be this way. Inspired by the prophetic image of beating swords into plows, it provides a provocative look at gun violence in America and offers a clarion call to change our hearts regarding one of the most significant moral issues of our time. The authors transcend stale rhetoric and old debates about gun control to offer a creative and productive response. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 31 Mar. 2019 p. 12; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 96.
Description: On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. The blast killed four young girls and injured twenty-two others. The FBI suspected four particularly radical Ku Klux Klan members. Yet due to reluctant witnesses, a lack of physical evidence, and pervasive racial prejudice the case was closed without any indictments. But as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously expressed it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Years later, Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the case, ultimately convicting one of the bombers in 1977. Another suspect passed away in 1994, and then-US Attorney Doug Jones tried and convicted the final two in 2001 and 2002. This represented the correction of an outrageous miscarriage of justice nearly forty years in the making. Jones went on to win election as Alabama’s first Democratic Senator since 1992 in a dramatic race against Re-publican challenger Roy Moore. (publ.)

Description: In the 1960s and 70s, the two most important black nationalist organizations, the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, gave voice and agency to the most economically and politically isolated members of black communities outside the South. Though vilified as fringe and extremist, these movements proved to be formidable agents of influence during the civil rights era, ultimately giving birth to the Black Power movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 Feb. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Every time a shooting makes national headlines, the same debates erupt: Is the problem guns or mental health? Why is the United States unique in its gun violence problem? Can we reduce this violence while protecting the right to bear arms? Newtown, Connecticut, native, Disciples of Christ minister, and Sandy Hook elementary school alumnus Donald V. Gaffney brings a calm and compassionate voice to these complex questions, offering a guide for individuals and groups to reflect on and discuss guns and gun violence. This book explores the place of guns in our individual and national histories, violence in Scripture, the legal issues surrounding gun rights, and ways in which we as moral, life-valuing people can bridge the divide to help solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. To move beyond the talking points and rhetoric dominating gun violence discussions, Gaffney concludes chapters with questions for reflection and discussion to encourage self-examination, exploration, and evaluation of potential solutions to gun violence. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (May 2019 vol. 56 no. 9) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Communities That Care (CTC) is a coalition-based prevention system implemented successfully in dozens of communities across the world that promotes healthy development and reduces crime rates for youth. Drawing on literature from criminology, community psychology, and prevention science this book describes the conditions and actions necessary for effective community-based prevention. The authors illustrate how effective community-based prevention can be undertaken by describing how the CTC prevention system has been developed, implemented, evaluated, and disseminated across the U.S. and internationally. Communities that Care shares invaluable lessons about the implementation and evaluation of community-level interventions and establishes a set of best practices for anyone seeking to engage in and/or evaluate effective prevention efforts. (publ.)

Review: NYRB 18 Apr. 2019 (noted)
Description: From the national legal director of the ACLU, an essential guidebook on standing up for fundamental civil liberties and resisting executive over-reach–named one of Washington Post’s Notable Nonfiction Books of the Year. What role do American citizens have in safeguarding our Constitution and defending liberty? Must we rely on the federal courts, and the Supreme Court above all, to protect our rights? Legal scholar David Cole argues that we all have a part to play in the grand civic dramas of our era–and proposes specific tactics for fighting Donald Trump’s policies. Examining the most successful rights movements of the last thirty years, Cole reveals how groups of ordinary Americans confronting long odds have man-aged, time and time again, to convince the courts to grant new rights and protect existing ones. This book is a fundamentally new explanation of how our Constitution works and the part citizens play in it. (publ.)

Description: This volume tracks the changing national views on gender roles. Historian Micah Issitt traces the path of gender politics in American society, with each chapter providing commentary on a selected primary source. Drawing from the popular press, key court and legislative battles, speeches, social activism and opinion polls, this book offers readers mixed sources of in-formation woven together to highlight the overall momentum of developing public opinion. As forces compete to move the needle of popular thought on this issue, readers will see the push and pull tension between traditional and modern definitions of prescribed gender roles. Issues discussed include historic patterns of gender balance, religion’s role in community organization, feminism’s impact on defining gender roles for men and women at home and in the workplace, family-centered social policy, the backlash against progressive gender politics, the gender pay parity movement, and the passionate activism of #metoo as a response to corporate and government workplace sexual harassment. Issitt provides an essential resource for history and social studies research and an accessible commentary on the ways in which the idea of gender roles have evolved. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Apr. 2018 p. 83.
Description: A heart-rending narrative that moves from the Himalayas to the Middle East to Houston and culminates in an epic court battle, this is a story of death and life–of the war in Iraq, the killings of the twelve Nepalese, a journalist determined to uncover the truth, and a trio of human rights lawyers dedicated to finding justice. At its heart is one unforgettable young woman, Kamala Magar, who found the courage to face the influential men who sent her husband to his death–a model of strength hope, bravery, and an unbreakable spirit who reminds us of the power we all have to make a difference. August, 2004. Twelve men left their village in Nepal for jobs in Amman, Jordan. They had no idea that they had actually been hired for sub-contract work on an American military base in Iraq. The men were kidnapped and murdered by Islamic extremists; their gruesome deaths were one of the first graphic execution videos disseminated on the web. Their deaths received little notice. Simpson uncovered a web of evil spanning the globe–and triggered a chain of events involving one brave young widow, three indefatigable human rights lawyers, and a formidable multinational corporation with deep governmental ties. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a “Great Uprising.” Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood. By focusing on three specific cities as case studies–Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania–Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this “Great Uprising” are still predominant in American culture today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 25 Feb. 2019 p. 24.
Description: Ninety-six people die from guns in America every single day. Twelve thou-sand Americans are murdered each year. The United States has more mass shootings, gun suicides, and nonfatal gun injuries than any other industrialized country in the world. Gun-safety advocates have tried to solve these problems with incremental changes such as background checks and banning assault style military weapons. They have fallen short. In order to significantly and permanently reduce gun deaths the United States needs a bold new approach: a drastic reduction of the 390 million guns already in circulation and a new movement dedicated to a future with fewer guns. … Igor Volsky tells the story of how he took on the NRA just by using his Twitter account, describes how he found common ground with gun enthusiasts after spending two days shooting guns in the desert, and lays out a blueprint for how citizens can push their governments to reduce the number of guns in circulation and make firearms significantly harder to get. An aggressive licensing and registration initiative, federal and state buybacks of millions of guns, and tighter regulation of the gun industry, the gun lob-by, and gun sellers will build safer communities for all. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West. Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative. One of the most renowned historians of the American left and LGBTQ movement, as well as a pioneering social-justice activist, Duberman reviews the fifty years since Stonewall with an immediacy and rigor that informs and energizes. He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society, and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost–the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 93; LJ Mar. 2019 p. 140.
Description: This celebration of Black resistance, from protests to art to sermons to joy, offers a blueprint for the fight for freedom and justice–and ideas for how each of us can contribute. Many of us are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy, our privacy, and our hard-won civil rights. If you’re Black in the US, this is not new. As Colorlines editors Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin show, Black Americans subvert and resist life-threatening forces as a matter of course. In these pages, leading organizers, artists, journalists, comedians, and filmmakers offer wisdom on how they fight White supremacy. It’s a must-read for anyone new to resistance work, and for the next generation of leaders building a better future. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A revealing portrait of Richard Oakes, the brilliant, charismatic Native American leader who was instrumental in the takeovers of Alcatraz, Fort Lawton, and Pit River and whose assassination in 1972 galvanized the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, DC. The life of this pivotal Akwesasne Mohawk activist is explored in an important new biography based on extensive archival research and key interviews with activists and family members. Historian Kent Blansett offers a transformative and new perspective on the Red Power movement of the turbulent 1960s and the dynamic figure who helped to organize and champion it, telling the full story of Oakes’s life, his fight for Native American self-determination, and his tragic, untimely death. This invaluable history chronicles the mid-twentieth century rise of Intertribalism, Indian Cities, and a national political awakening that continues to shape Indigenous politics and activism to this day. (publ.)

Description: Asks what attitude and what policies democracies should have concerning individuals who give money away for public purposes; and argues that the aims of mass giving should be the decentralization of power in the production of public goods, such as the arts, education, and science. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Feb. 2019 p. 105.
Description: Shortly before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. called for a radical redistribution of economic and political power to transform the whole of society. In 1967, he envisioned and designed the Poor People’s Campaign, an interracial effort that was carried out after his death. This campaign brought together impoverished Americans of all races to demand better wages, better jobs, better homes, and better education. Sylvie Laurent explores this overlooked and obscured episode of the late civil rights movement, deepening our understanding of King’s commitment to social justice and also of the long-term trajectory of the civil rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 7 Jan. 2019 p. 49.
Description: New aspects of the misogyny that impacts girls and women worldwide continue to emerge every day. However, recent movements (e.g., #MeToo, Time’s Up, the Women’s March) indicate a strong hunger for a meaningful resource for thoughtful activists. Impassioned but practical, this book dis-cusses the social contexts of misogyny, such as toxic masculinity and rape culture. It traces the history of misogyny and considers its meaning today–what is new and what is old. The author also proposes strategies for effective feminist action. Written for advocates of gender equality who are already aware of misogyny, the book includes Action Steps as tools for activism on both the individual and political levels. Misogyny is a timely text that offers concrete guidance as we strive for the egalitarian society that, despite all setbacks, we are capable of achieving." (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 17 Aug. 2018 p. 30.
Description: Author Siddhartha Kara has documented the realities of human trafficking and forced labor in order to reveal the degrading and dehumanizing system that strips people of their dignity for the sake of profit–and to link the suffering of the enslaved to the day-to-day lives of consumers in the West. In this book, Kara draws on his many years of expertise to demonstrate the scope of slavery and offer a concrete path to its abolition. From labor trafficking in the U.S. agricultural sector to sex trafficking in Nigeria to forced labor in the Thai seafood industry, Kara depicts the myriad faces and forms of slavery, providing a comprehensive grounding in the realities of modern-day servitude. Drawing on sixteen years of field research in more than sixty countries around the globe–including revelatory interviews with both the enslaved and their oppressors–Kara sets out the key manifestations of modern slavery and how it is embedded in global supply chains. Enslavement offers immense profits at minimal risk through the exploitation of vulnerable subclasses whose brutalization is tacitly accepted by the current global economic order. Kara has developed a business and economic analysis of slavery based on metrics and data that attest to the scale and functioning of these systems of exploitation. Beyond this data-driven approach, he unflinchingly portrays the torments endured by the power-less. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 7 Jan. 2019 p. 50; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 104.
Description: In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anticolonial struggle would continue. In this book, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. It is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 10 Mar. 2019 p. 14.
Description: The bestselling author of Columbine offers a deeply moving account of the extraordinary teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting who pushed back against the NRA and Congressional leaders and launched the singular grassroots March for Our Lives movement. Emma González called BS. David Hogg called out Adult America. The uprising had begun. Cameron Kasky immediately recruited a colorful band of theatre kids and rising activists and brought them together in his living room to map out a movement. Four days after escaping Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, two dozen extraordinary kids announced the audacious March for Our Lives. A month later, it was the fourth largest protest in American history. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Collects never-before-published photographs taken by Jim Lucas (1944-1980), an exceptional documentary photographer. His black and white images, taken during 1964 through 1968, depict events from the civil rights movement including the search for the missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, the Meredith March Against Fear, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to the Mississippi Delta, and more. The photographs exemplify Lucas’s technical skill and reveal the essential truth in his subjects and the circumstances surrounding them. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 16 Nov. 2018 p. 13 (author op/ed); TLS 1 Mar. 2019; LR Feb. 2019 p. 10.
Description: Mary Fulbrook’s encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using “reckoning” in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time, from early brutality through programs to euthanize the sick and in-firm in the 1930s to the full functioning of the death camps in the early 1940s, and across the post-war decades of selective confrontation with perpetrators and ever-expanding commemoration of victims, Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about “dealing with the past” and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: The racial injustice that continues to plague the United States couldn’t be a clearer challenge to the country’s idea of itself as a liberal and democratic society, where all citizens have a chance at a decent life. Moreover, it raises deep questions about the adequacy of our political ideas, particularly liberal political theory, to guide us out of the quagmire of inequality. So what does justice demand in response? What must a liberal society do to address the legacies of its past, and how should we aim to reconceive liberalism in order to do so? In this book, Andrew Valls considers two solutions, one posed from the political right and one from the left. From the right is the idea that norms of equal treatment require that race be treated as irrelevant–in other words, that public policy and political institutions be race-blind. From the left is the idea that race-conscious policies are temporary, and are justifiable insofar as they promote diversity. This book takes issue with both of these sets of views, and therefore with the constricted ways in which racial justice is debated in the United States today. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 23 May 2019 p. 10.
Description: Do you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justice? In this book, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make it clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 16 Nov. 2018 p. 13 (author op/ed)
Description: A new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America. With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy was thought to be final. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. This faith was misplaced. Authoritarianism returned to Russia, as Putin found fascist ideas that could be used to justify rule by the wealthy. In the 2010s, it has spread from east to west, aided by Russian warfare in Ukraine and cyberwar and information war in Europe and the United States. Russia found allies among nationalists, oligarchs, and radicals everywhere, and its drive to dissolve Western institutions, states, and values found resonance within the West itself. The rise of populism, the British vote against the EU, and the election of Donald Trump were all Russian goals, but their achievement reveals the vulnerability of Western societies and the uncertain character of Western political order. This fundamental challenge to democracy presents an opportunity to better understand the pillars of our own political order. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Sept. 2018 p. 66; PW 3 Sept. 2018 p. 89.
Description: After the death of her son, Eric Garner, at the hands of New York City police officers on Staten Island went viral, Gwen Carr’s life changed forever. The illegal chokehold that took Garner’s life has been seared into the public consciousness forever as the large black man struggled to breathe while a white policeman held him down on a hot concrete sidewalk. His death set the tone for a new normal where young black men and women now automatically document police interactions with their cell phones for fear of brutality and even death. As one of the Mothers of the Movement, Gwen Carr, a retired transit train operator, now dedicates her time to fighting for racial equality, especially the way law enforcement treats blacks in the United States. (publ)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Fifty years ago, a single bullet robbed us of one of the world’s most eloquent voices for human rights and justice. This book goes beyond the iconic view of Martin Luther King Jr. as an advocate of racial harmony, to explore his profound commitment to the poor and working class and his call for “nonviolent resistance” to all forms of oppression–including the economic injustice that “takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” Phase one of King’s agenda led to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But King also questioned what good it does a man to “eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” In phase two of his activism, King organized poor people and demonstrated for union rights, while also seeking a “moral revolution” to replace the self-seeking individualism of the rich along with an overriding concern for the common good. “Either we go up together or we go down together,” King cautioned, a message just as urgent in America today as then. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 July 2018 p. 198.
Description: Author Bill Sizemore tells the story of his slave-owning Virginia family, their slaves, and those slaves’ descendants–a story that lay buried by a century of denial and historical amnesia. Its threads run through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the struggle for civil rights, and the crippling legacy of slavery that still plagues the nation to-day. In microcosm, it is the story of Virginia and the South. In telling it, Sizemore hopes to advance an essential, if painful, national conversation about race. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Nov. 2018 p. 79.
Description: Jabari Asim disrupts what Toni Morrison has exposed as the “Master Narrative” and replaces it with a story of black survival and persistence through art and community in the face of centuries of racism. In eight wide-ranging and penetrating essays, he explores such topics as the twisted legacy of jokes and falsehoods in black life; the importance of black fathers and community; the significance of black writers and stories; and the beauty and pain of the black body. What emerges is a rich portrait of a community and culture that has resisted, survived, and flourished despite centuries of racism, violence, and trauma. These thought-provoking essays present a different side of American history, one that doesn’t depend on a narrative steeped in oppression but rather reveals black voices telling their own stories. (publ.)

Description: The economist Albert O. Hirschman famously argued that citizens of democracies have only three possible responses to injustice or wrongdoing by their governments: we may leave, complain, or comply. But Jason Brennan argues that there is a fourth option. When governments violate our rights, we may resist. We may even have a moral duty to do so. For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow the government and its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can’t fight back. But Brennan makes the case that we have no duty to allow the state or its agents to commit injustice. We have every right to react with acts of “uncivil disobedience.” We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force in self-defense or to defend others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials behave unjustly or abuse their power. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 Apr. 2018 p. 78; NYT/M 7 July 2019 p. 14 (reference)
Description: Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo explores how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: Economist 31 Mar. 2018 p. 83.
Description: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers from around the world to explore and illuminate their experiences. Poignant and insightful, this collection of essays reveals moments of uncertainty, resilience in the face of trauma, and a reimagining of identity. It is a powerful look at what it means to be forced to leave home and find a place of refuge. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 13 Oct. 2017 (new books)
Description: Case studies of the famed protocols in relation to the Korean War, the French in Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam, post-break-up Yugoslavia, Russia in Chechnya, the Israeli Defense Forces, the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, private military and security companies, and peacekeeping missions. (CHE)

Reviewed: CHE 11 Aug. 2017 (new books)
Description: Domestic workers exist on the margins of the world labor market. Maids, nannies, housekeepers, au pairs, and other care workers are most often “off the books,” working for long hours and low pay. They are not afforded legal protections or benefits such as union membership, health care, vacation days, and retirement plans. Many women who perform these jobs are migrants, and are oftentimes dependent upon their employers for room and board as well as their immigration status, creating an extremely vulnerable category of workers in the growing informal global economy. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of research, plus interviews with a number of key movement leaders and domestic workers, Jennifer N. Fish presents the compelling stories of the pioneering women who, while struggling to fight for rights in their own countries, mobilized transnationally to enact change. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 18 Apr. 2019 p. 49.
Description: This book makes the case that, yes, human rights work. Critics may counter that the movement is in serious jeopardy or even a questionable byproduct of Western imperialism. They point out that Guantanamo is still open, the Arab Spring protests have been crushed, and governments are cracking down on NGOs everywhere. But respected human rights expert Kathryn Sikkink draws on decades of research and fieldwork to provide a rigorous rebuttal to pessimistic doubts about human rights laws and institutions. She demonstrates that change comes slowly and as the result of struggle, but in the long term, human rights movements have been vastly effective. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 14 Oct. 2017 p. 76
Description: From the University of California, Berkeley, to Middlebury College, institutions of higher learning increasingly find themselves on the front lines of cultural and political battles over free speech. Repeatedly, students, faculty, administrators, and politically polarizing invited guests square off against one another, assuming contrary positions on the limits of thought and expression, respect for differences, the boundaries of toleration, and protection from harm. In this book, political philosopher Sigal Ben-Porath examines the current state of the arguments, using real-world examples to explore the contexts in which conflicts erupt, as well as to assess the place of identity politics and concern with safety and dignity within them. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 27 Apr. 2018 (New Books)
Description: Jonathan Coley explores the unique pathways along which students join and work within movements for LGBT inclusion at Christian institutions of higher learning across the country. Having interviewed doz-ens of students in LGBT advocacy groups at four conservative, religious schools of different denominations, Coley is able to use students’ own words to analyze their self-conceptions and activist tactics, while shedding new light on faith-based LGBT activism on college campuses. Moreover, Coley shows that there is no single pathway to activism and, perhaps most importantly, that religion and pro-LGBT activism are not mutually exclusive categories. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 Mar. 2018 p. 106; NYRB 22 Nov. 2018 p. 28; Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education. The struggle to desegregate America’s schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools. In this book, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 19 Mar. 2018 p. 79.
Description: Now, more than ever, young people are motivated to make a difference in a world they’re bound to inherit. They’re ready to stand up and be heard–but with much to shout about, where they do they begin? What can I do? How can I help? How I Resist is the response, and a way to start the conversation. To show readers that they are not helpless, and that anyone can be the change. A collection of essays, songs, illustrations, and interviews about activism and hope, features an all-star group of contributors. Readers will find hope and support through voices that are at turns personal, funny, irreverent, and instructive. Not just for a young adult audience, this incredibly impactful collection will appeal to readers of all ages who are feeling adrift and looking for guidance. (publ.)

Description: Drawing on testimonies, memoirs, and personal interviews of Holocaust survivors, Françoise S. Ouzan reveals how the experience of Nazi persecution impacted their personal reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reintegration into a free society. She sheds light on the life trajectories of various groups of Jews, including displaced persons, partisan fighters, hidden children, and refugees from Nazism. Ouzan shows that personal success is not only a unifying factor among these survivors but is part of an ethos that unified ideas of homeland, social justice, togetherness, and individual aspirations in the redemptive experience. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 16 June 2017 (new books)
Description: Human Rights after Hitler is a groundbreaking history about the forgotten work of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II in response to Axis atrocities. He explains the commission’s work, why its files were kept secret, and demonstrates how the lost precedents of the commission's indictments should introduce important new paradigms for prosecuting war crimes today. The UNWCC examined roughly 36,000 cases in Europe and Asia. Thousands of trials were carried out at the country-level, and hundreds of war criminals were convicted. This rewrites the history of human rights in the wake of World War II, which is too focused on the few trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 25 May 2018 p. 12.
Description: Liberalism and our modern allegiance to human rights rest on a foundational commitment to moral equality. But why, given our differences, must we always treat one another as equals? Most who have attempted to answer this question have appealed to the idea of dignity, the idea that all human beings possess an intrinsic worth–grounded in capacities, for example, to reflect, reason, or love–that raises us up in the order of nature. … Andrea Sangiovanni rejects this predominant view and offers a radical alternative. He argues that, to understand our commitment, we must begin with a consideration not of equality but inequality. Rather than search for a chimerical value-bestowing capacity possessed to an equal extent by each one of us, we ought to ask: Why and when is it wrong to treat others as inferior? He comes to the conclusion that our commitment to moral equality is best explained by a rejection of cruelty rather than a celebration of rational capacity. He then traces the impact of this fundamental shift for our understanding of human rights, and the place of anti-discrimination norms in that understanding. (publ.)

Holdings: Copies at Calmar & Peosta. 2nd copy will be added to Peosta. Donated as part of 2018 MLK event speaker Patti Miller, Mon Jan 15, 2018 10am – 11:20am. URL: https://www.nicc.edu/aboutnicc/news/mlk-day-2018.html
Description: Gives firsthand accounts of the experiences of six Iowa natives who, though personally unfamiliar with racial issues, felt compelled to volunteer that summer. Viewers will hear their stories as they share their motivations, fears, triumphs and life altering events that took place during that historic summer 50 years ago.

Reviewed: LR 2/2108 p. 29; TLS 10 Aug. 2018 p. 9; NYT/BR 27 May 2018 p. 15.
Description: Explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century–the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965-66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention. An expert in modern Indonesian history, genocide, and human rights, Geoffrey Robinson sets out to account for this violence and to end the troubling silence surrounding it. In doing so, he sheds new light on broad and enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? What are the social and political ramifications of such acts and such silence? (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 96(5) Sept./Oct. 2017 p. 180
Description: Started in the wake of George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and uncompromising campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that “Black Lives Matter” comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity--and not just equal rights--of black people. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Dec. 2017 p. 120; LJ Dec. 2017 p. 108; NYT 25 Jan. 2018 p. C1
Description: Award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects the national myth-making of American civil rights, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR (2/18/2018)
Description: In crafted, well-honed prose, Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker, whose homage to the sugar trade Sugar Sphinx electrified American audiences. This book is a moving meditation documenting the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In the tradition of Paul Gilroy, it is a cri de coeur for the significance of politically bold–even dangerous–art to all people and nations. (publ.)

Description: Fox shifts our focus outward, to one of literature’s powers: the power to reshape our world in very public, very active ways. In this book, you will encounter readers who criticized the Bush administration’s war on terror by republishing poems by writers ranging from Shakespeare to Amiri Baraka everywhere from lampposts to the New York Times. You will read about people in Michigan and Tennessee, who leveraged a community reading program on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath to organize support for those in need during the Great Recession and to engage with their neighbors about immigration. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 20 Oct. 2017 p. 34.
Description: While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of a policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 18 Jan. 2018 p. 37
Description: For generations, this Muslim group has suffered routine discrimination, violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses by the Buddhist majority of Myanmar. As horrifying massacres have unfolded in 2017, international human rights groups have accused the regime of complicity in an ethnic cleansing campaign against them. Authorities refuse to recognize the Rohingyas as one of Myanmar’s 135 "national races," denying them citizenship rights in the country of their birth and severely restricting many aspects of ordinary life, from marriage to free movement. In this updated edition, Azeem Ibrahim chronicles the events leading up to the current, final cleansing of the Rohingya population, and issues a clarion call to protect a vulnerable, little known Muslim minority. (pb)

Reviewed: PW 12 Feb. 2018 p. 72; LJ 15 Feb. 2018 p. 72; Choice Aug. 2018 vol. 55 no. 12 (Highly recommended; recommended for community college library collections)
Description: The definitive history of the Kerner Commission, whose report on urban unrest reshaped American debates about race and inequality. Historian Steven M. Gillon offers a revelatory new history of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders–popularly known as the Kerner Commission. Convened by President Lyndon Johnson after riots in Newark and Detroit left dozens dead and thousands injured, the commission issued a report in 1968 that attributed the unrest to “white racism” and called for aggressive new programs to end discrimination and poverty. “Our nation is moving toward two societies,” it warned, “one black, and one white–separate and unequal.” (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 25 Aug. 2017 (new books)
Description: Consuming with a conscience is one of the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. Every day we make decisions about how to spend our money and, for the socially conscious, these decisions matter. Political consumers “buy green” for the environment or they “buy pink” to combat breast cancer. They boycott Taco Bell to support migrant workers or Burger King to save the rainforest. But can we overcome the limitations of consumer identity, the conservative pull of consumer choice, co-optation by corporate marketers, and other pitfalls of consumer activism in order to marshal the possibilities of consumer power? Can we, quite literally, shop for change? Shopping for Change brings together the historical and contemporary perspectives of academics and activists to show readers what has been possible for consumer activists in the past and what might be possible for today's consumer activists. (publ.)

Description: Free speech is under attack at colleges and universities today, with critics on and off campus challenging the value of open inquiry and freewheeling intellectual debate. Too often speakers are shouted down, professors are threatened, and classes are disrupted. In Speak Freely, Keith Whittington argues that universities must protect and encourage free speech because vigorous free speech is the lifeblood of the university. Without free speech, a university cannot fulfill its most basic, fundamental, and essential purposes, including fostering freedom of thought, ideological diversity, and tolerance. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 23 June 2017 p. 24
Description: With a heavy heart and bearing artistic gifts, Kate Evans draws the faces of refugees coming from Syria, Africa, and elsewhere to “The Jungle,” a makeshift camp in Calais, France, and in doing so Evans captures the refugees’ full humanity, intelligence, and suffering as they search for family, home, and dignity. An antidote to the anti-immigrant populism that is raging across the world, Threads is the real story that puts a human face on a very topical news item. (publ.)
Note: A Graphic Novel.

Description: Nowak recounts his experience visiting countries, reviewing documents, collecting evidence, and conducting interviews with perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of torture. He offers vignettes of the many states he visited, comparing their diverse experiences, and he explores the rise of new twenty-first-century practices of torture, questioning whether capital punishment, corporal punishment, solitary confinement, and contemporary forms of slavery qualify as torture. Ultimately, Torture offers vital insights for human-rights scholars and professionals as it tries to make the unfathomable more comprehensible and to clarify the causes and dynamics of torture. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Folter: Die Alltäglichkeit des Unfassbaren (Vienna: K&S, 2012).

Reviewed: PW 26 Feb. 2018 p . 83
Description: In an age where Roe v. Wade is in danger of being over-turned, a minister and ethicist offers a Christian defense of abortion, arguing that we need to trust women to make moral decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and their futures. Unplanned pregnancy and abortion are a normal part of women’s reproductive lives: roughly one-third of US women will have an abortion by age forty-five, and fifty to sixty percent of the women who have abortions were using birth control during the month that they got pregnant. Yet women who have abortions are shamed and judged for their actions, and safe access to abortion is under relentless assault. In this carefully reasoned and powerful book, Christian ethicist Rebecca Todd Peters argues that abortion is not the problem. The problem is our inability to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents who must weigh the concrete moral question of how to respond to a particular unplanned pregnancy. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 28 Apr. 2017 p. 33.
Description: The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights. (publ.)

Description: Roderick A. Ferguson shows how the university, particularly the public university, is moving away from “the people” in all their diversity. As more resources are put toward STEM education, humanities and interdisciplinary programs are being cut and shuttered. This has had a devastating effect on the pursuit of knowledge, and on interdisciplinary programs born from the hard work and effort of an earlier generation. This is not only a reactionary move against the social advances since the ‘60s and ‘70s, but part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Description: The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 19 May 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: TLS 10 Mar. 2017 (Author’s new book)
Contents: Kosovo 1 (July 1999) – Lebanon (October 2000) – Nicaragua (April 2001) – Kosovo 2 (October 2000) – Romania (August 2001) – New York/Pakistan/Afghanistan (Sept. 2001-Feb. 2002) – Colombia (October 2002) – Northern Iraq/Iraq (April 2002 and March-April 2003).
Description: Echoes of Violence is an award-winning collection of personal letters to friends from a foreign correspondent who is trying to understand what she witnessed during the iconic human disasters of our time – in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and New York City on September 11th, among many other places. Originally addressing only a small group of friends, Carolin Emcke started the first letter after returning from Kosovo, where she saw the aftermath of ethnic cleansing in 1999. She began writing to overcome her speechlessness about the horrors of war and her own sense of failure as a reporter. Eventually, writing a letter became a ritual Emcke performed following her return from each nightmare she experienced.

Reviewed: NYT 29 May 2017 “How the Swastika Became a Confederate Flag”; Choice Sep 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Essential; recommended for community college libraries); TLS 9 June 2017 p. 18.; FA 96(5) Sept./Oct. 2017 p. 182; NYRB 25 Oct. 2018 p. 46.

Reviewed: CHE 24 Feb. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: CHE 21 Apr. 2017 (new books); NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 29 (new acad. books)
Description: Examines the appeal of mass marches for turn-of-the-millennium Americans.

Reviewed: CHE 16 Dec. 2016

Description: Should descendants of slaves be compensated for the suffering their ancestors endured? Should the losing side in a war be forced to pay the victor? When modern-day states confront long-ago atrocities, is acknowledgement and an apology enough? This fascinating examination of reparations offers opinions by leading experts on such past injustices as the Holocaust, the slave trade, the Armenian genocide, the forced relocation of Native Americans, and the Imperial Japanese Army s comfort women. An asset to any library, Reparations takes on the very uncomfortable issue of how governments and individuals can reckon with sins of the past. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE May 26, 2017 (“Prof. Hacker” Maha Bali)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 28 May 2017 p. 8 (Al Franken)
Description: As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, "white rage at work. … Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains." (publ.)

Reviewed Choice Sep. 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Highly Recommended)
Description: “This book is crucial reading for all Americans.” (Choice) Lakhdar and Mustafa were living quiet, peaceful lives in Bosnia when, in October 2001, they were arrested and accused of participating in a terrorist plot. After a three-month investigation uncovered no evidence, all charges were dropped and Bosnian courts ordered their freedom. However, under intense U.S. pressure, Bosnian officials turned them over to American sol-diers. They were flown blindfolded and shackled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were held in outdoor cages for weeks as the now-infamous military prison was built around them. Guantanamo became their home for the next seven years. They endured torture and harassment and force-feedings and beatings, all the while not knowing if they would ever see their families again. (publ.)