New at the Library

Jane Elliott, a third-grade schoolteacher in rural Iowa, tried out a shocking experiment to show the scorching impact of racism on children. Elliott separated her students according to the color of their eyes. Those with brown eyes would lord over those with blue eyes. The brown-eyed students were given permission to heckle and berate the blue-eyed students, even to start fights with them. The Blue-Eyed, Brown-Eyed Experiment would become world famous.

Reviewed: NYRB 6 Oct. 2022 p. 6.

Description: In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. She explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, this work breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. (publ.)

" ... the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions ... the companies' founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus on maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone."--Dust jacket flap.

This balanced history of Xinjiang and its Uyghur inhabitants traces the development of this ethnic group from imperial China to the present and its fraught relationship with the Chinese state. Morris Rossabi focuses especially on CCP policies, both progressive and repressive, toward the Uyghurs since 1949.

A gripping, twisting account of a small town set on fire by hatred, xenophobia, and ecological disaster - a story that weaves together corporate malfeasance, a battle over shrinking natural resources, a turning point in the modern white supremacist movement, and one woman's relentless battle for environmental justice.

The term "gender" was first distinguished from "sex" in the 1950s, when psychologists began to discuss the idea of "gender roles" - behaviors and responsibilities given to people by a society rather than flowing from their biology. Over the last two decades, transgender people have expanded our understanding of gender even further, introducing to the mainstream the concept of "gender identity," an individual's understanding of their own gender. Along the way, there have been numerous debates and controversies (i.e., what is the influence of biology on gender, how does the media impact gender and gender roles, and do transgender people reinforce gender stereotypes or help to free us from them?). Gender: What Everyone Needs to Know guides the reader through basic definitions; the history of gender as a concept; the role of biology, psychology, and culture on gender; and gender norms over time and across the globe.

Calmar Campus

What does nonbinary really mean? What is gender nonconforming? And isn't they a plural pronoun? In this charming and disarming guide, a real-life they-using genderqueer writer unpacks all your burning questions in a fun, visual way. No soapboxes or divisive comment-section wars here! Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, always human, this gender-friendly primer will get you up to speed. It's about more than just bathrooms and pronouns--this is about gender expression and the freedom to choose how to identify. While they might only be for some, that freedom is for everyone! " A clear, kind guide to gender nonconformity. Getty's cheeky tone and the punchy black-and-white illustrations by Brooke Thyng make this book a useful reference for anyone with questions about gender, whether their own or those they witness in the larger world." -Booklist

"This 4 volume set is an essential resource for those interested in investigating the lives, histories, and futures of indigenous peoples around the world"

The untold story about how the internet became social, and why this matters for its future   "A great book for anyone who wants to understand the early days of online communications."--Preston Gralla, Arts Fuse   Fifteen years before the commercialization of the internet, millions of amateurs across North America created more than 100,000 small-scale computer networks. The people who built and maintained these dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. From ham radio operators to HIV/AIDS activists, these modem enthusiasts developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. The Modem World tells an alternative origin story for social media, centered not in the office parks of Silicon Valley or the meeting rooms of military contractors, but rather on the online communities of hobbyists, activists, and entrepreneurs. Over time, countless social media platforms have appropriated the social and technical innovations of the BBS community. How can these untold stories from the internet's past inspire more inclusive visions of its future?

Reviewed: PW 5/9/2022 p. 48

Description: Jessa Crispin melds personal narrative with history and current events to explore the dark side of Kansas, where she grew up. She meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in the US’s imagination about itself, why its foundational myths are the myths of what it means to be “American.” And while we may romanticize aspects of Midwestern life-the nuclear family, the pioneering attitude, the small town friendliness–the realities, she argues, are harsher: so-called Midwestern values cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, over women, over the economically disadvantaged. Her subjects range from The Wizard of Oz to the White race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities; from the murders of the Clutter family made famous in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, to her own horror when a beloved art teacher inexplicably one night slaughtered his wife and three daughters and killed himself. Her pursuit takes her back to the Civil War, John Brown, and the immigration of German religious communities to the Midwest; she then ferries across the Atlantic Ocean to Amsterdam to visit a lay seminary for women where, since the Reformation, they have found sanctuary from violence and domestic abuse. (publ.)

The Imperial Experience is dedicated to synthesis and comparison. Following a comprehensive theoretical survey and bold world history synthesis, fifteen chapters analyze and explore the multifaceted experience of empire across cultures and through the ages. The broad range of perspectives includes: scale, world systems and geopolitics, military organization, political economy and elite formation, monumental display, law, mapping and registering, religion, literature, the politics of difference, resistance, energy transfers, ecology, memories, and the decline of empires. This broad set of topics is united by the central theme of power, examined under four headings: systems of power, cultures of power, disparities of power, and memory and decline. Taken together, these chapters offer a comprehensive and unique view of the imperial experience in world history.

In The Pornography Wars, Burke does a deep dive into the long history of pornography in America and then turns her gaze on our present society to examine the ways this industry touches on the most intimate parts of American lives. She offers a complete understanding of the major players in the debates around porn's place in society: everyone from sex workers, activists, therapists, religious leaders, and consumers. In doing so, she addresses and debunks the myths that surround porn and porn usage while showing how everything from the way we teach children about sex to the legal protections for what can be published is tied up in the deeply complicated battles over pornography.

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and considers its importance as a means of changing the way we think about the world.

Refugees and other forced migrants are one of the great contemporary challenges the world is confronting. Throughout the world people leave their home countries to escape war, natural disasters, and cultural and political oppression. Unfortunately, even today, the international community struggles to provide an adequate response to this vast population in need. This Very Short Introduction covers a broad range of issues around the causes and impact of the contemporary refugee crisis for both receiving states and societies, for global order, and for refugees and other forced migrants themselves.

"Social media and the always-connected digital life really are undermining our relationships. Carl Marci shows that our phone and Facebook habits aren't just distractions; they're altering our brains, harming our ability to communicate intimately. Fortunately, there are ways out. More than a critic, Marci offers solutions for tech-life balance" ---Provided by publisher.

Description: The authors challenge the reader to see race as everyone’s issue. The book’s early chapters establish a solid understanding of privilege and power, leading to a critical exploration of discrimination. The authors also draw upon key theoretical perspectives, such as cultural materialism, critical race theory, and the social construction of race to provide readers with the tools to discuss racial privilege. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, including perspectives from sociology, psychology, history, and economics provides a holistic and accessible introduction to the challenging issue of race. Throughout the book, compelling, concrete examples and detailed definitions of terminology help us understand theoretical perspectives and research evidence. Discussion questions at the end of each chapter encourage readers to think critically about the theories and evidence, often prompting people to relate the material in the text to their own experiences & encourage critical self-reflection.

An impassioned exploration of the ways in which social media has manipulated us all 'Witty, rigorous, and as urgent as a fire alarm' Dorian Lynskey 'Cooly prosecutorial' Guardian Nobody meant for this to happen. Facebook didn't mean to facilitate a genocide. Twitter didn't want to be used to harass women. YouTube never planned to radicalise young men. But with billions of users, these platforms need only tweak their algorithms to generate more 'engagement'. In so doing, they bring unrest to previously settled communities and erode our relationships. Social warming has happened gradually - as a by-product of our preposterously convenient digital existence. But the gradual deterioration of our attitudes and behaviour on- and offline - this vicious cycle of anger and outrage - is real. And it can be corrected. Here's how.

Reviewed: TLS 25 June 2021 p. 11.

Description: In the first decades of the 20th century, five women–Katherine Routledge, Maria Czaplicka, Winifred Blackman, Beatrice Blackwood and Barbara Freire-Marreco–arrived at Oxford to take the newly created Masters in Anthropology. Though their circumstances differed radically, all were intent on visiting and studying remote communities a world away from their own. Through their work, they resisted the prejudices of the male establishment, proving that women could be explorers and scientists, too. In the wastes of Siberia; in the villages and pueblos of the Nile and New Mexico; on Easter Island; and in the uncharted interior of New Guinea, they found new freedoms–yet when they returned to England, loss, madness and self-doubt awaited them. (publ.)

With faith, hope, and compassion, acclaimed religion scholar Timothy Beal shows us how to navigate the inevitabilities of the climate crisis and the very real-and very near-possibility of human extinction What if it's too late to save ourselves from climate crisis? When Time is Short is a meditation for what may be a finite human future that asks how we got here to help us imagine a different relationship to the natural world. Modern capitalism, as it emerged, drew heavily upon the Christian belief in human exceptionalism and dominion over the planet, and these ideas still undergird our largely secular society.

Reviewed: PW 9 Nov. 2020 p. 64.
Description: The idea and practice of civility has always been wielded to silence dissent, repress political participation, and justify violence upon people of color. Although many progressives today are told that we need to be more polite and thoughtful, less rancorous and angry, when we talk about race in America, civility maintains rather than disrupts racial injustice. Spanning two hundred years, political sciences professor Zamalin’s accessible blend of intellectual history, political biography, and contemporary political criticism shows that civility has never been neutral in its political uses and impacts. The best way to tackle racial inequality is through “civic radicalism,” an alternative to civility found in the actions of Black radical leaders including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Audre Lorde. Civic radicals shock and provoke people. They name injustice and who is responsible for it. They protest, march, strike, boycott, and mobilize collectively rather than form alliances with those who fundamentally oppose them.

Description: Social justice rhetoric is prevalent in contemporary America, but are we as a nation ready to do the work to effect real change? Emily Allen Williams has gathered a group of essays that interrogate matters of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access. In doing so, the essays contribute to what Williams call “tilling the ground,” i.e. a process by which the nation is prepared for the changes that must follow the rhetoric through the work of diversity and inclusion in a variety of social arenas. With subject matters ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement and children’s literature to the contemporary workplace and university, the collected essays present and analyze progress that is already being made and outline ways for our society to continue to move this process forward until the rhetoric of social justice manifests in actual conditions of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access throughout the nation. (publ.)

Description: Hate, racial violence, exclusion, and racist laws receive breathless media coverage, but such attention focuses on distinct events that gain our attention for twenty-four hours. The events are presented as episodic one-offs, unfortunate but uncanny exceptions perpetrated by lone wolves, extremists, or individuals suffering from mental illness–and then the news cycle moves on. If we turn to scholars and historians for background and answers, we often find their knowledge siloed in distinct academic subfields, rarely connecting current events with legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynist, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. But recent hateful actions are deeply connected to the past–joined not only by common perpetrators, but by the vast complex of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs that comprise white supremacy in the United States. Gathering together a cohort of researchers and writers, this book provides much-needed connections between violence present and past. It illuminates the career of white supremacist and patriarchal violence in the United States, ranging across time and impacted groups in order to provide a working volume for those who wish to recognize, understand, name, and oppose that violence.

Reviewed: NYRB 11 Feb. 2021 p. 19.
Description: Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household has in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, they offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen–slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination–makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 15 Feb. 2021 p. 177.
Description: Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies, surviving war and peace, expansions and recessions, economic meltdowns and global pandemics. We dream of the jackpot, the big exit, the life-altering payday, in whatever form that takes. (Americans spent $81 billion on lottery tickets in 2019, more than the GDPs of most nations.) We would escape “essential” day jobs and cramped living spaces, bury our debts, buy that sweet spread, and bail out struggling friends and relations. But rarely do we follow the fantasy to its conclusion–to ponder the social, psychological, and societal downsides of great affluence and the fact that so few possess it. What is it actually like to be blessed with riches in an era of plagues, political rancor, and near-Dickensian economic differences? How mind-boggling are the opportunities and access, how problematic the downsides? Does the experience differ depending on whether the money is earned or unearned, where it comes from, and whether you are male or female, white or black? Finally, how does our collective lust for affluence, and our stubborn belief in social mobility, explain how we got to the point where forty percent of Americans have literally no wealth at all?

Description: Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes. This assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces–the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth–where neutrality and politeness deflect true engagement in our shared problems. (publ.)
Award Note: Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

Reviewed: TLS 14 Jan. 2022 p. 9.
Description: As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Sam Quiñones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths-at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States. Quiñones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quiñones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 21 Dec. 2020 p; TLS 21 May 2021 p. 7.
Description: The New Age of Empire takes us back to the beginning of the European Empires, outlining the deliberate terror and suffering wrought during every stage of the expansion, and destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built, and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm, perpetuating global inequality through business, government, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. The West is rich because the Rest is poor. Capitalism is racism. The West congratulates itself on raising poverty by increments in the developing world while ignoring the fact that it created these conditions in the first place, and continues to perpetuate them. (publ.)
Author Note: Kehinde Andrews is Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, where he founded, and is currently director of, the Centre for Critical Social Research. At BCU he was also one of the team who founded the first undergraduate degree in Black Studies.

Reviewed: NYRB 18 Nov. 2021 p. 17.
Description: What if the idealized image of American society–a land of opportunity that will reward hard work with economic success–is completely wrong? Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy. This is the first book to systematically address and confront many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty. Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock powerfully demonstrate that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths; indeed in many ways they are more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if poverty is an experience that touches the majority of Americans? What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive? These are much more disturbing realities to consider because they call into question the very core of America’s identity.

Description: Silicon Valley culture expert, Fred Turner, has partnered with photographer, Mary Beth Meehan, to present an unseen view from the center of the tech world. This photography book does not celebrate the success of young entrepreneurs striving for efficiency in minimalist corporate campuses. Instead, we see portraits of those who struggle to survive–families displaced by an impossible real estate market or injured by environmental degradation. Their stories of stress, poverty, and pollution encourage reflection on the sacrifices of the community living in the same economic zone as thirty-something billionaires and a call for responsibility to the people of the real Silicon Valley. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 28 Feb. 2022 p. 64.
Description: In this debut collection, Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through. These nine essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. She takes on the cartoon industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law’s refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems, and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. ... Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR April 2022 p. 42; NYT/BR 8 May 2022 p. 21.
Description: Shame is a powerful and sometimes useful tool: When we publicly shame corrupt politicians, abusive celebrities, or predatory corporations, we reinforce values of fairness and justice. But as Cathy O’Neil argues in this revelatory book, shaming has taken a new and dangerous turn. It is increasingly being weaponized–used as a way to shift responsibility for social problems from institutions to individuals. Shaming children for not being able to afford school lunches or adults for not being able to find work lets us off the hook as a society. After all, why pay higher taxes to fund programs for people who are fundamentally unworthy? O’Neil explores the machinery behind all this shame, showing how governments, corporations, and the healthcare system capitalize on it. There are damning stories of rehab clinics, reentry programs, drug and diet companies, and social media platforms–all of which profit from “punching down” on the vulnerable. … With clarity and nuance, O’Neil dissects the relationship between shame and power. Whom does the system serve? Is it counter-productive to call out racists, misogynists, and vaccine skeptics? If so, when should someone be “canceled?” How do current incentive structures perpetuate the shaming cycle? And, most important, how can we all fight back? (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 31 Jan. 2022 p. 63.
Description: In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Elizabeth Alexander, wrote a moving reflection on the psyche of young Black America, turning a mother’s eye to her sons' generation. Originally published in the New Yorker, the essay lovingly observed the lives and attitudes of young people who even as children could never be shielded from the brutality that has ended so many Black boy’s and men’s lives. With camera phones and internet access, the racist violence that has plagued America throughout its history has become more extensively documented, and immediately and constantly accessible through news articles and social media posts. The children of this generation were teens too when Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012 before reaching adulthood, becoming the first in a series of now well known names, and any efforts from mothers to protect their sons from the heartbreaking truth of our society was futile in the digital age of information. Now, the viral essay which spoke so resonantly to this unique historical moment that it was shared and praised by Barack Obama, John Legend, Melissa Harris Perry, and many more, is expounded upon, bookended by additional essays woven with profound insight and heart and combined with groundbreaking art by prominent and up-and-coming Black artists. Taking the reader through our past and extrapolating its lasting impact through to our current moment, Elizabeth then turns her eye to the radical potential of our future. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 9 Apr. 2021 p. 30.
Description: This book explores the incentives and effects of modern welfare policy, contrasted with outcomes of global basic income pilots in the past seventy years. The author contends that paternalistic and counterproductive eligibility rules in the modern American welfare state violate the human dignity of the poor and make it nearly impossible to escape the “poverty trap.” Furthermore, these types of restrictions are absent from expenditures aimed at middle and upper-income households such as mortgage interest deductions and tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Case examples from the author’s years as a front-line social worker and interviews with basic income pilot recipients in Ontario, Canada, are woven throughout the book to better illustrate the effects of the current system and the hidden potential of more radical alternatives such as a universal basic income.

Description: In the tradition of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of the non-analogous experience of being Black. A seminal work that strikingly combines groundbreaking philosophy with searing flights of memoir, it presents the tenets of an increasingly influential intellectual movement that theorizes blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Rather than interpreting slavery through a Marxist framework of class oppression, Frank B. Wilderson III, “a truly indispensable thinker” (Fred Moten), demonstrates that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive, anti-black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but an almost necessary force in our civilization that flourishes today, and that Black struggles cannot be conflated with the experiences of any other oppressed group. In mellifluous prose, Wilderson juxtaposes his seemingly idyllic upbringing in halcyon midcentury Minneapolis with the harshness that he would later encounter, whether in radicalized, late-1960s Berkeley or in the slums of Soweto. Following in the rich literary tradition of works by DuBois, Malcolm X and Baldwin, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. (publ.)

Description: Throughout the past several years, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have been a part of a growing phenomenon to address the diverse needs of organizations. However, the act of diversity training and implementation in programs has traditionally been reactive as a result of a scandal rather than proactive. As more industries see the benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion training, we will continue to see the benefits of a sustainable, healthy working environment for all. This work is an essential reference source that shares the challenges and opportunities faced by diversity, equity, and inclusion officers who are leading their organizations to becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive working environments. Featuring research on topics such as institutional equity, organizational culture, and diverse workplace, this book is ideally designed for administrators, human resource specialists, researchers, business professionals, academicians, and students, as well as organizations looking to make the intentional shifts necessary to develop and foster a more inclusive working and learning environment. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 15 June 2020 p. 50; TLS 22 Jan. 2021 p. 19.
Description: In this critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from the Kavanaugh hearings and “Cat Person” to Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Warren, Manne shows how privileged men’s sense of entitlement–to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, medical care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power–is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences. In clear, lucid prose, she argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from "mansplaining" and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are “unelectable.” Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural currents of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought, while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them. With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern. (publ.)

Description: From their domestication to their taboo, the role of pigs in the ancient Near East is one of the most complicated topics in archaeology. Rejecting monocausal explanations, this book adopts an evolutionary approach and uses zooarchaeology and texts to unravel the cultural significance of swine from the Paleolithic to today. Five major themes emerge: The domestication of the pig from wild boar in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the unique roles that pigs developed in agricultural economies before and after the development of complex societies, the raising of swine in cities, the shifting ritual roles of pigs, and the formation and development of the pork taboo in Judaism and, later, Islam. The development of this taboo has inspired much academic debate. MIT archaeology lecturer Max Price argues that the well-known taboo described in Leviticus reflects the intention of the Biblical writers to develop an image of a glorious pastoral ancestry for a heroic Israelite past, something they achieved by tying together existing food traditions. These included a taboo on pigs, which was developed early in the Iron Age during conflicts between Israelites and Philistines and was revitalized by the Biblical writers. The taboo persisted and mutated, gaining strength over the next two and a half millennia. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 11 Feb. 2021 p. 19.
Description: Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household has in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, they offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen–slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination–makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore. (publ.)

Ghetto: The History of a Word offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day. It details how the ghetto emerged as an ambivalent metaphor for "premodern" Judaism in the nineteenth century and how it was later revived to refer to everything from densely populated Jewish immigrant enclaves in modern cities to the hypersegregated holding pens of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

Reviewed: PW 19 Aug. 2019 p. 84.
Description: The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people–from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story ... Invisible People collects the best of Tizon’s rich, empathetic accounts ... Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles–many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times–are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 3 Jan. 2021 p. 12.
Description: A history of American white male identity by the author of So You Want to Talk About Race imagines a merit-based, non-discriminating model while exposing the actual costs of successes defined by racial and sexual dominance. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? Oluo shows how, throughout the last 150 years of American history, white male supremacy has wrought devastating consequences for people of color, women and non-binary people, and white men themselves. She shows that the erasure and oppression of everyone else in America causes racist and sexist behavior, and imagines the possibilities for a new white male identity, free from racism and sexism. (publ.)

For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history. In Sea People, Thompson explores fascinating stories of ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 6 Sept. 2020 p. 13.
Description: After the election of Donald J. Trump, journalist Seyward Darby went looking for the women of the so-called “alt-right”–arguing that it is just white nationalism with a new label. The mainstream media depicted the alt-right as a bastion of angry white men, but was it? As women headlined resistance to the Trump administration’s bigotry and sexism, most notably at the Women’s Marches, Darby wanted to know why others were joining a movement espousing racism and anti-feminism. Who were these women, and what did their activism reveal about America’s past, present, and future? She researched dozens of women across the country before settling on three–Corinna Olsen, Ayla Stewart, and Lana Lokteff. Each was born in 1979, and became a white nationalist in the post-9/11 era. Their respective stories of radicalization upend much of what we assume about women, politics, and political extremism. … With acute psychological insight and eye-opening reporting, Darby steps inside the contemporary hate movement and draws connections to precursors like the Ku Klux Klan. Far more than mere helpmeets, women like those discussed have been sustaining features of white nationalism. Sisters in Hate shows how the work women do to normalize and propagate racist extremism has consequences well beyond the hate movement. (publ.)

Description: Western culture has used cats for centuries as symbols of darkness, pathos, and alienation, and the communities that helped build the internet explicitly constructed themselves as outsiders, with snark and alienation at the core of their identity. Thus cats became the sine qua non of cultural literacy for the Extremely Online, not to mention an everyday medium of expression for the rest of us. ... Internet cats can differ in dramatic ways, from the goth cats of Twitter to the glamourpusses of Instagram to the giddy, nonsensical silliness of Nyan Cat. But they all share common traits and values. Bringing together fun anecdotes, thoughtful analyses, and hidden histories of the communities that built the internet, Elyse White shows how japonisme, punk culture, cute culture, and the battle among different communities for the soul of the internet informed the sensibility of online felines. Internet cats offer a playful–and useful–way to understand how culture shapes and is shaped by technology. (publ.)

Description: The West’s actions in the Middle East are based on a fundamental misunderstanding: political Islam is repeatedly assumed to be the main cause of conflict and unrest in the region. The idea that we can decipher Jihadist radicalization or problems in the Middle East simply by reading the Qur’an has now become symptomatic of our age. This dangerous over-simplification and the West’s obsession with Islam dominates media and policy analysis, ultimately skewing intervention and preventing long-term solutions and stability in the region. Ömer Taşpinar, who has 20 years’ research and policymaking experience, explains here what is really going on in the Middle East. The book is based on three of the most pressing cases currently under the spotlight: the role of Erdogan and the unrest in Turkey; the sectarian clashes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon; and the existence of the so-called Islamic State. Islam is often seen as the root cause of the challenge associated with these cases. But by unpacking the real issues, such as entrenched authoritarianism, vast energy resources, excessive defense spending, and the youth bulge, the book demystifies what is happening and cites governance and nationalism as the main drivers of conflict. The book shows the importance of treating the causes–which are economic, social and institutional–rather than the symptom–the continued and growing success of Islamist parties and jihadist movements in assessing the Middle East. In revealing exactly how Islamism is activated and by analyzing the structural challenges of the region, this unique insider’s account provides a map to understanding Middle Eastern wars and conflicts and the prospects for the future. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 6 July 2020 p. 66.
Description: After declining for a century through hard-fought labor movement victories, average annual work hours increased approximately 8 percent for all working adults from 1979 to 2016. In Worked Over, sociologist Jamie McCallum reveals how the battle over time on the job has been central to conflicts over capitalism from the beginning, how overwork is at the heart of the inequities and injustices in America’s economy today, and why workers must fight to take control of the time they spend working. From Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley campuses, from late night Uber deliveries to later night strip clubs, from factories in Ohio to retail floors everywhere, McCallum explains how the contemporary American workplace exploits workers’ time and constrains their lives. Whether it’s the manager’s stopwatch, the scheduling algorithm’s dispassionate authority, or our own internal clock that pushes us because we’re afraid of falling behind or losing our jobs, ordinary people have lost much say over when and how much we work. Work, more than anything else, dictates when we sleep, eat, raise our kids, and live the rest of our lives. Popular discussions of overwork tend to focus on striving professionals, but as McCallum demonstrates, it’s the hours of low-wage workers have increased the most, and it’s their working lives that remain the most precarious and unpredictable in a service-oriented, on-demand economy. What’s needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle. Throughout this book, McCallum offers inspiring stories of how the battle to win back control of time has been renewed today by those most vulnerable to the capitalist society’s electronic whip. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2019 p. 106.
Description: Former Syracuse University quarterback and NFL veteran Don McPherson examines how the narrow definition of masculinity adversely impacts women and creates many “blind spots” that hinder the healthy development of men. Dissecting the strict set of beliefs and behaviors that underpin our understanding of masculinity, he contends that we don't raise boys to be men, we raise them not to be women. Using examples from his own life, including his storied football career, McPherson passionately argues that viewing violence against women as a “women’s issue” not just ignores men’s culpability but conflates the toxicity of men’s violence with being male. … He leads us beyond the blind spots and toward solutions, analyzing how we can engage men in a sustained dialogue, with a new set of terms that are aspirational and more accurately representative of the emotional wholeness of men. (publ.)

Description: Thanks to a declining birth rate, upticks in immigration, and evolving gender roles, America looks much different from the way it did 100, 50, or even 25 years ago. Aging baby boomers are putting stress on the current health care system. Young people have different values and priorities from those of previous generations. Unequal distribution of wealth has created a greater economic divide than ever before. How will America's shifting demographics affect the country’s future? Through diverse viewpoints, this fascinating volume explores the many factors that contribute to what it means to be an American and how that might change in this century. (publ.)
Note: Library standing order.

Description: Today’s debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States–one that concerns more than mere “potty politics.” Alexander K. Davis takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years’ worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status. Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century “comfort stations,” twentieth-century man-dates requiring separate-but-equal men’s and women’s rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” Davis reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are–and always have been–consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide. (publ.)

Description: This book analyzes enduring racial divides in homeownership, work, and income using the politics of respectability concept. It also examines an alternative way of understanding the Black Lives Matter movement, NFL protests, and challenges facing various black ethnic groups. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 1 June 2019 p. 72.
Description: Photographer and writer Chris Arnade shines new light on America’s poor, drug-addicted, and forgotten–both urban and rural, blue state and red state–and indicts the elitists who’ve left them behind. Like Jacob Riis in the 1890s, Walker Evans in the 1930s, or Michael Harrington in the 1960s, Chris Arnade bares the reality of our current class divide in stark pictures and unforgettable true stories. Arnade’s raw, deeply reported accounts cut through today’s clickbait media headlines and indict the elitists who misunderstood poverty and addiction in America for decades. After abandoning his Wall Street career, Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald’s. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America’s Back Row–those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row’s values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as nave. As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: “a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who’ve been left behind. (publ.)

Reviewed: The Economist 15 June 2019 p. 54 (referenced)
Description: A startling exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web–and how to bring it out of the shadows. Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming–one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri unveil how the services we use from companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast human labor force that is kept deliberately concealed. The people who do “ghost work” make the internet seem smart. They perform high-tech, on-demand piecework: flagging X-rated content, proofreading, transcribing audio, con-firming identities, captioning video, and much more. The shameful truth is that no labor laws protect them or even acknowledge their existence. They often earn less than legal minimums for traditional work, they have no health benefits, and they can be fired at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked in this “ghost economy,” and that number is growing every day. In this investigation, Gray and Suri make the case that robots will never completely eliminate “ghost work” and the unchecked quest for artificial intelligence could spark catastrophic work conditions if not stopped in its tracks. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 1 Aug. 2019 p. C8; LR Dec./Jan. 2019/20 p. 64; PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 30 (Best Books 2019); PW 24 June 2019 p. 162; LRB 4 March 2021.
Description: A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled “primitive” or “advanced.” What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. … Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas’s students were some of the century’s most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead’s life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan’s city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. (publ.)
Note: UK edition published with title: The Reinvention of Humanity: A Story of Race, Sex, Gender and the Discovery of Culture (London: Bodley Head, 2019).

Reviewed: TLS 6 Dec. 2019 p. 31; PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 16 (PW Best Books 2019).
Description: In early 2014, the Islamic State clinched its control of Raqqa in Syria. Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, urged Muslims around the world to come join the caliphate. Witnessing the brutal oppression of the Assad regime in Syria, and moved to fight for justice, thousands of men and women heeded his call. At the heart of this story is a cast of unforgettable young women who responded. Emma, from Germany; Sharmeena from Bethnal Green, London; Nour from Tunis: these were women–some still in high school–from urban families, some with university degrees and bookshelves filled with novels by Jane Austen and Dan Brown; many with cosmopolitan dreams of travel and adventure. But instead of finding a land of justice and piety, they found themselves trapped within the most brutal terrorist regime of the twenty-first century, a world of chaos and upheaval and violence. What is the line between victim and collaborator? How do we judge these women who both suffered and inflicted intense pain? What role is there for Muslim women in the West? In what is bound to be a modern classic of narrative nonfiction, Moaveni takes us into the school hallways of London, kitchen tables in Germany, the coffee shops in Tunis, the caliphate’s OB/GYN and its “Guest House for Young Widows”–where wives of the fallen waited to be remarried–to demonstrate that the problem called terrorism is a far more complex, political, and deeply relatable one than we generally admit. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 94.
Description: America is a land in which extremism no longer belongs to the country’s shadowy fringes, but comfortably exists in the national mainstream. That is the alarming conclusion by intelligence analyst Daryl Johnson, an expert on domestic extremism with more than twenty-five years of experience tracking radicalized groups for the US government. In this book, Johnson dissects the rapidly expanding forms of American hatred and radicalization, including white nationalists, antigovernment militias, antifascists (Antifa), militant black nationalists, and extremist Islamic groups. The author develops a concise model that explains how extremists on both the far right and the far left use the same techniques to recruit and radicalize individuals into violent offenders. He also examines the political forces that fuel this threat and have kept the US government from properly identifying and developing countermeasures to deal with it, including a disproportional emphasis on Islamic terrorism. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Aug. 2019 p. 24 (cited); PW 24 Feb. 2020 p. 62.
Description: Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. But the appeal to science to strengthen racist ideologies is on the rise–and increasingly part of the public discourse on politics, migration, education, sport and intelligence. Stereotypes and myths about race are expressed not just by overt racists, but also by well-intentioned people whose experience and cultural baggage steer them towards views that are not supported by the modern study of human genetics. Even some scientists are uncomfortable expressing opinions deriving from their research where it relates to race. Yet, if understood correctly, science and history can be powerful allies against racism, granting the clearest view of how people actually are, rather than how we judge them to be. This is a vital manifesto for a twenty-first century understanding of human evolution and variation, and a timely weapon against the misuse of science to justify bigotry. (publ.)

Description: Ewing weaves together detailed historical and contemporary examples of immigration to the United States that move beyond hackneyed stereotypes about immigrants to give readers a fact-based understanding of why and how immigration occurs. Discussing immigration from the 1800s to today, he explores the motivations, challenges, and triumphs of various immigrant groups, including the Irish, Italians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians. Tackling issues of discrimination and assimilation, this book looks at how immigrants have added to the American culture and way of life, and what to expect going forward. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 23 Feb. 2020 p. 7.
Description: By official count, more than one out of every six American children live be-neath the poverty line. But statistics alone tell little of the story. Jeff Madrick brings to light the often invisible reality and irreparable damage of child poverty in America. Keeping his focus on the children, he examines the roots of the problem, including the toothless remnants of our social welfare system, entrenched racism, and a government unmotivated to help the most voiceless citizens. Backed by new and unambiguous research, he makes clear the devastating consequences of growing up poor: living in poverty, even temporarily, is detrimental to cognitive abilities, emotional control, and the overall health of children. The cost to society is incalculable. The inaction of politicians is unacceptable. Still, Madrick argues, there may be more reason to hope now than ever before. Rather than at-tempting to treat the symptoms of poverty, we might be able to ameliorate its worst effects through a single, simple, and politically feasible policy that he lays out in this impassioned and urgent call to arms. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 4 Nov. 2019 p. 51.
Description: How do individuals move from being homeless to finding safe, stable, and secure places to live? Can we recreate the conditions that helped them most? What policies are needed to support what worked-and to remove common obstacles? Addressing these questions, Jamie Rife and Donald Burnes start from the premise that the most important voices in efforts to end homelessness are the ones most often missing from the discussion: the voices of those with lived experience. In this book, they gather the first-person stories of some who have not only survived, but thrived, going on to find positive home situations. Highlighting what we can learn from these personal stories, Rife and Burnes combine them with in-depth discussions of key themes and issues and point to the shifts necessary in current policy and practice that are essential if we are to effectively respond to this problem. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.
Description: Male privilege refers to the sociological concept that men are automatically granted certain privileges and advantages in politics, society, and the workplace based entirely on their gender. Feminists and others concerned with perceived gender inequality hope to challenge the preconceived values and notions that enable male privilege and the inherently patriarchal nature of society. The viewpoints in this volume address the definition and history of male privilege, offer differing perspectives on whether it exists and how it may influence society, and propose solutions to help reduce gender inequality. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 26 Oct. 2019 p. 74; NYT/BR 17 Nov. 2019 p. 13; LRB 1 April 2021 p. 15.
Description: It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal–that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding–reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has be-come exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. (publ.)

Reviewed: LRB 9 May 2019 p. 36; TLS 13 Dec. 2019 p. 34.
Description: This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we're allowed to “go” in public. Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. Canadian journalist Lezie Lowe reveals the opposite is true. This is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways–momentous and mockable–public bathrooms just don’t work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. … For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn’s dis-ease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don’t want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of trans-people. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women’s bath-room. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it’s clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy? (publ.)

Description: The word “privilege” gets thrown around a lot during discussions of inequality in America, whether it be about race, gender, or wealth. But how serious an issue is privilege, really? Is it manufactured by marginalized groups? Should those with marked advantages feel threatened? America prides itself on democratic ideals and advancement through merit and hard work. Are these ideals based on a lie? If so, what practical solutions can be undertaken to level the playing field? Presenting a wide varety of perspectives from authoritative voices, this volume unpacks a complex issue that many are uncomfortable confronting. (publ.)
Note: Library standing order.

Description: Examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that re-inforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 25 Aug. 2019 p. 1.
Description: In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Oregon. Encamped in the shadowlands of the republic, insisting that the Federal government had no right to own public land, the occupiers were seen by a divided country as either dangerous extremists dressed up as cowboys, or as heroes insisting on restoring the rule of the Constitution. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 27 May 2019 p. 81.
Description: Does racism have a rational basis in science? In this book, Gavin Evans tackles head-on the debate that has been raging on internet message boards and in academic journals. No longer limited to the fringe, race-based studies of intelligence have been discussed by thinkers such as Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson. If these studies were true, they would provide an intellectual justification for inequality and discrimination. Examining the latest research on how intelligence develops and laying out new discoveries in genetics, palaeontology, archaeology and anthropology to unearth the truth about our shared past, Evans demolishes the pernicious myth that our race is our destiny and instead reveals what really makes us who we are. (publ.)

Description: Clarifies the relationship between biology and race, showing how racism can result from a misguided blending of biology with social construction. Using arresting examples, the authors aim to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. Controversial issues of race and IQ, race and athletic ability, and perceptions of race and beauty are examined, as are those of affirmative action and reparations for slavery. The authors also explore how income inequality, healthcare dis-parities, unequal access to education, an unfair justice system, and mass incarceration all call for constructive social policies that remodel American society in ways that will build a better, more resilient, and happier society. The goal is a society in which equal civil rights are clearly derived from the recognition of equal human rights, and equal opportunity provides the pathway to equitable results. (publ.)

Note: Library Standing Order.
Description: Since the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the term “toxic masculinity” has been used as an insult, a defense, and a lazy explanation of society’s ills. What is toxic masculinity? Is it inherently a condemnation or is it a nuanced labeling of the limitations of gender roles? Writ-ten by diverse authors from a variety of perspectives, the essays in this en-lightening resource explore the state of masculinity today, whether toxic masculinity actually exists, how it affects others, and how changes in men’s and women’s roles may or may not be something to fear. (publ.)

Description: Focuses on building understanding of some of the issues associated with US gun culture and the contemporary debate about the availability and use of guns. This edited volume is unique in that it draws on a wide variety of disciplines and presents perspectives on both sides of the debate. Contributors hail from the academic disciplines of history, social work, criminal justice, sociology, religion, and theological ethics as well as policy agencies. Some chapters examine the issues social-psychologically to help readers better understand dynamics within the debate. Others pose important ethical and philosophical questions about gun culture. Still others address practical policy solutions for enhancing gun safety and minimizing gun violence, even bringing in international perspectives. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Aug. 2019 p. 28.
Description: How has the way we spend our time changed over the last fifty years? Are we really working more, sleeping less and addicted to our phones? What does this mean for our health, wealth and happiness? Everything we do happens in time and it feels like our lives are busier than ever before. Yet a detailed look at our daily activities reveals some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in. This book delves into the unrivalled data collection and expertise of the Centre for Time Use Research to explore fifty-five years of change and what it means for us to-day. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Aug. 2019 p. 118.
Description: Best-selling author and licensed mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition. Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Vi-king funeral? In the tradition of Randall Munroe’s What If?, Doughty’s new book blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five urgent questions posed by her youngest fans. Readers will learn what happens if you die on an airplane, the best soil for mummifying your dog, and whether or not you can preserve your friend’s skull as a keepsake. Featuring illustrations from Dianne Ruz, this book will delight anyone interested in the fascinating truth about what will happen (to our bodies) after we die. (publ.)

Description: In what has become the era of the mass shooting, we are routinely taken to scenes of terrible violence. Often neglected, however, is the long after-math, including the efforts to effect change in the wake of such tragedies. On April 16, 2007, thirty-two Virginia Tech students and professors were murdered. Then the nation’s deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman, the tragedy sparked an international debate on gun culture in the United States and safety on college campuses. Experiencing profound grief and trauma, and struggling to heal both physically and emotionally, many of the survivors from Virginia Tech and their supporters put themselves on the front lines to advocate for change. Yet since that April, large-scale gun violence has continued at a horrifying pace. In After Virginia Tech, award-winning journalist Thomas Kapsidelis examines the decade after the Virginia Tech massacre through the experiences of survivors and community members who have advocated for reforms in gun safety, campus security, trauma recovery, and mental health. (publ.)

Description: The American Dream explores the sturdiness of this idea of The American Dream in 2018. Is the American dream of upward mobility accessible in a society so fragmented and economically unequal? Does the American Dream still exist in a country experiencing an anti-immigration trend? Have economic policies had an impact on American striving? This issue also explores the relationship between education and jobs, technological displacement of workers, downward mobility among certain groups, labor mobility and home ownership as indicators of the health of the idea of the American Dream. (publ.)
Note: Library Standing Order.

Reviewed: TLS 31 May 2019 p. 33.
Description: With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future? Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in this book provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. (publ.)

Description: Across the Euro-Atlantic world, political leaders have been mobilizing their bases with nativism, racism, xenophobia, and paeans to “traditional values,” in brazen bids for electoral support. How are we to understand this move to the mainstream of political policies and platforms that lurked only on the far fringes through most of the postwar era? Does it herald a new wave of authoritarianism? Is liberal democracy itself in crisis? In this volume, three distinguished scholars draw on critical theory to address our current predicament. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky share a conviction that critical theory retains the power to illuminate the forces producing the current political constellation as well as possible paths away from it. Brown explains how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for manifestly unemancipatory movements; Gordon dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens and reflects instead on the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force; and Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure. These incisive essays do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, and they do not offer the false comforts of an easy re-turn to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth-and twentieth-century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, offering fiery and urgent responses to the demands of the day. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 July 2018 p. 191.
Description: In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the middle class back from the Chicago suburbs to the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the city’s North Side. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers, “rehabbers” imagined a new kind of neighborhood–a renovated, modern community that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter, but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision. But as the old buildings came down, cheap studios were combined to create ever more spacious, luxurious homes. Property values rose swiftly, and the people who were evicted to make room for progress began to assert their own ideas about the future of Lincoln Park. Over the course of the 1960s, divisions within the community deepened. Letters and picket lines gave way to increasingly violent strikes and counterstrikes as each camp tried to settle the same existential questions that beguile so many cities today: Who is this neighborhood for? And who gets to decide? (publ.)

Description: Drawing on more than 150 in-depth interviews, authors Huey & Broll explore the diverse effects of trauma in the lives of homeless female victims of violence. They closely examine the negative patterns common to cases of homeless female victims of violence and develop informed solutions for responding to issues that perpetuate cycles of female homelessness. This book offers not only a comprehensive examination of trauma and the role it can play in shaping homeless women’s lives, but it also explores how women may recover and develop strategies for coping with traumatic experiences. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries; FA 98(3) May/June 2019 p. 197.
Description: Immigration is shaking up electoral politics around the world. In this book, economist Neeraj Kaushal investigates this rising anxiety and tests common complaints against immigration. She finds that immigration, on balance, is beneficial. It is neither the volume nor pace of immigration but the willingness to accept immigrants that is fueling disaffection. Featuring accessible and in-depth analysis of the economics of immigration in worldwide perspective, Blaming Immigrants is an informative and timely introduction to a critical global issue. (publ.)

Description: A detailed Introduction that discusses the complex issues of both legal and illegal drug use throughout history, including a comprehensive Timeline of significant events related to drug use, legalization, and addiction from 8,000 BCE to 2018. The 28 chapters give a detailed history of the drugs that have garnered the most attention from the American public, beginning in the 1700s up to the present day. Media coverage of various drug epidemics, legislation, and the creation of such federal organizations as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are covered, beginning with the nation’s first recognized opium crisis in the 1800s and ending with the current opioid crisis and new treatment options. The role of physicians in prescribing potentially dangerous and addictive drugs to treat medical conditions–and to treat addictions to other drugs–is explored, as well as the often unscrupulous marketing efforts of pharmaceutical companies. … The time period covered is sweeping. The content starts with a New York Times Letter to the Editor from 1860 with testimonial for “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,” a cough medicine for children that contained alcohol and morphine, and ends with a new treatment program implemented in San Francisco in 2018, to treat drug addicts on the street instead of in treatment facilities, where they fear arrest. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Top 75 books essential for community college libraries.
Description: Physician Jonathan M. Metzl’s quest to understand the health implications of “backlash governance” leads him across America’s heartland. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, he examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. And he shows these policies’ costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. White Americans, Metzl argues, must reject the racial hierarchies that promise to aid them but in fact lead our nation to demise. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Founded as a utopian experiment in 1833, Oberlin embraced radical racial egalitarianism in its formative years. By the eve of the Civil War, when 20 percent of its local population was black, the community modeled progressive racial relations that, while imperfect, shone as strikingly more advanced than in either the American South or North. Emancipation and the passage of the Civil War amendments seemed to confirm Oberlin’s egalitarian values. Yet, contrary to the expectations of its idealistic founders, Oberlin’s residents of color fell increasingly behind their white peers economically in the years after the war. Moreover, leaders of the white-dominated temperance movement conflated class, color, and respectability, resulting in stigmatization of black residents. Over time, many white Oberlinians came to view black poverty as the result of personal failings, practiced residential segregation, endorsed racially differentiated education in public schools, and excluded people of color from local government. By 1920, Oberlin’s racial utopian vision had dissipated, leaving the community to join the racist mainstream of American society. (publ.)

Description: The authors assess the gendered history of welfare reform. They fore-ground arguments advanced by feminists for a welfare policy that would respect single mothers’ rights while advancing their opportunities and assuring economic security for their families. Kornbluh and Mink consider welfare policy in the broad intersectional context of gender, race, poverty, and inequality. They argue that the subject of welfare reform always has been single mothers, the animus always has been race, and the currency always has been inequality. Yet public conversations about poverty and welfare, even today, rarely acknowledge the nexus between racialized gender inequality and the economic vulnerability of single-mother families. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 13 May 2018 p. 26.
Description: What draws young men into violent extremist groups? What are the ideologies that inspire them to join? And what are the emotional bonds forged that make it difficult to leave, even when they want to? Having conducted in-depth interviews with ex-white nationalists and neo-Nazis in the United States, as well as ex-skinheads and ex-neo-Nazis in Germany and Sweden, renowned sociologist Michael Kimmel demonstrates the pernicious effects that constructions of masculinity have on these young recruits. Kimmel unveils how white extremist groups wield masculinity to recruit and retain members–and to prevent them from exiting the movement. Young men in these groups often feel a sense of righteous indignation, seeing themselves as victims, their birthright upended in a world dominated by political correctness. Offering the promise of being able to “take back their manhood,” these groups leverage stereotypes of masculinity to manipulate despair into white supremacist and neo-Nazi hatred. Kimmel combines individual stories with a multiangled analysis of the structural, political, and economic forces that marginalize these men to shed light on their feelings, yet make no excuses for their actions. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Essential books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Knowledge of the origin and spread of farming has been revolutionized in recent years by the application of new scientific techniques, especially the analysis of ancient DNA from human genomes. In this book, Stephen Shennan presents the latest research on the spread of farming by archaeologists, geneticists and other archaeological scientists. He shows that it resulted from a population expansion from present-day Turkey. Using ideas from the disciplines of human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution, he explains how this process took place. He suggests that the evidence shows a very different picture than the one favored by many scholars, that hunter-gathers gradually transformed into farmers. (publ.)

Description: Between 1907 and 1937, thirty-two states legalized the sterilization of more than 63,000 Americans. Molly Ladd-Taylor tells the story of these state-run eugenic sterilization programs. She focuses on one such program in Minnesota, where surgical sterilization was legally voluntary and administered within a progressive child welfare system. Tracing Minnesota’s eugenics program from its conceptual origins in the 1880s to its official end in the 1970s, Ladd-Taylor argues that state sterilization policies reflected a wider variety of worldviews and political agendas than previously under-stood. She describes how, after 1920, people endorsed sterilization and its alternative, institutionalization, as the best way to aid dependent children without helping the “undeserving” poor. She also sheds new light on how the policy gained acceptance and why coerced sterilizations persisted long after eugenics lost its prestige. In Ladd-Taylor’s provocative study, eugenic sterilization appears less like a deliberate effort to improve the gene pool than a complicated but sadly familiar tale of troubled families, fiscal and administrative politics, and deep-felt cultural attitudes about disability, dependency, sexuality, and gender. Drawing on institutional and medical records, court cases, newspapers, and professional journals, Ladd-Taylor reconstructs the tragic stories of the welfare-dependent, sexually delinquent, and disabled people who were labeled feebleminded and targeted for sterilization. (publ.)

Description: Urban populations are on the rise, fueling a welcome rejuvenation of U.S. cities, many of which have been decaying since the suburban boom of the mid-twentieth century. But such renewal has resulted in the displacement of original residents, who can no longer keep pace with rising rents. Gentrification is often blamed for contributing to the housing crisis, but what about the improvements it has brought to America’s cities? The diverse perspectives in this volume explore the different effects of gentrification and imagine solutions for accommodating everyone in this changing urban landscape. (publ.)
Note: Library Standing Order.

Description: The advancement of transportation and communication technology has facilitated greater interaction between people throughout the world, a process known as globalization. Because of its various economic, social, cultural, and environmental implications, attitudes toward globalization are ambivalent. There are concerns about the exploitation of people and resources from less economically stable countries and the destruction of cultural traditions, but at the same time it has allowed the world to open up for people on an international scale. It is important to weigh the many costs and benefits of this complicated issue to form a reasoned response, which this book adeptly supports. (publ.)
Note: Library Standing Order.

Description: Thanks to advances in technology, medicine, Social Security, and Medicare, old age for many Americans is characterized by comfortable retirement, good health, and fulfilling relationships. But there are also millions of people over 65 who struggle with poverty, chronic illness, unsafe housing, social isolation, and mistreatment by their caretakers. What accounts for these disparities among older adults? Sociologist Deborah Carr’s new book draws insights from multiple disciplines to illuminate the complex ways that socioeconomic status, race, and gender shape nearly every aspect of older adults’ lives. By focusing on an often-invisible group of vulnerable elders, Carr reveals that disadvantages accumulate across the life course and can diminish the well-being of many. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (May 2019 vol. 56 no. 9) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Beyond serving as the definitive guide to happiness in this country, this book offers readers a provocative argument that challenges standard thinking. Despite popular belief, Americans have never been a particularly happy people. Our perpetual (and futile) search for happiness indicates widespread dissatisfaction and discontent with life in general, something that will come as a surprise to many. The image of Americans as a happy-go-lucky people is thus more mythology than reality, an important finding rooted in the inherent flaws of consumer capitalism. Our competitive and comparative American Way of Life has not proven to be an especially good formula for happiness, Samuel argues, with external signs of success unlikely to produce appreciably happier people. Given these findings, he suggests readers consider abandoning their pursuit of happiness and instead seek out greater joy in life. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books recommended as essential for community college libraries.
Description: In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 cities across the U.S., the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, commonly known as the Kerner Commission, was formed. As part of its work, the Commission employed social scientists to research the root causes of the disturbances, including the role that law enforcement played. Chief among its research projects was a study of 23 American cities, headed by social psychologist Robert Shellow. Shellow’s social scientists worked from the vast material brought back by teams of Commission investigators who fanned out across those cities, conducting interviews and gathering data. An early draft of the scientists’ analysis was delivered on November 22, 1967. Their report, titled “The Harvest of American Racism: The Political Meaning of Violence in the Summer of 1967,” provoked the Commission's staff by uncovering political causes for the unrest; the team of researchers was fired, and the controversial report remained buried at the LBJ Presidential Library until now. The first publication of the “Harvest” report half a century later reveals that many of the issues it describes are still with us, including how cities might more effectively and humanely react to groups and communities in protest. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Sept. 2018 p. 70.
Description: Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as white supremacy and racial injustice are more visible than ever before. Combining no-holds-barred social critique, humorous personal anecdotes, and analysis of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on systemic racism, sociologist Crystal M. Fleming provides a fresh, accessible, and irreverent take on everything that's wrong with our “national conversation about race.” Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance–and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Oct. 2018 p. 41.
Description: What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? How did a British drinking song become the national anthem of the United States? And what makes Superman so darned American? Every tradition, even the noblest and most cherished, has a history, nowhere more so than in the USA, which was born with a relative indifference, if not hostility, to the past. Most Americans would be surprised to learn just how recent and controversial the origins of their traditions are, as well as how those origins are often related to the trauma of the Civil War and to fears for American identity stemming from immigration and socialism. This book explores a wide range of beloved traditions, including political symbols, holidays, lifestyles and fictional characters, and looks at the people who conceived of and adapted them into the forms familiar to Americans and the innumerable people around the world influenced by American culture today. What emerges is the realization that all traditions are invented by particular people at particular times for particular reasons, and that the process of traditioning is forever ongoing. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: When we are born, we are each assigned a gender based on our physical anatomy. But why is it that some people experience dissonance between their biological sex and their personal identity? Is gender something we are, or something we do? Is our expression of gender a product of biology, or does it develop based on our environment? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world? Sally Hines, whose work on transgender issues draws on the intersections and disconnections of gender, sexuality, and their biological embodiment, is an ideally well-informed author to explore these questions. Supplementing this text are numerous illustrations that provide an accessible and informative visual component to the book. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 6 Jan. 2019 p. SR7 (author op/ed).
Description: In the last few decades, any hope of economic progress for black Americans has been slowly and steadily undermined. This quiet crisis was only exacerbated by the recession, which cut black households’ wealth by over 30 percent. Black millennials watched their parents try to play by the rules, buying homes and aspiring to the trappings of middle-class life, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. Now, in the post-Obama era, young black Americans face a critical turning point, as they try to realize dreams too long deferred ... Allen interweaves reflections on defining moments, from Hurricane Katrina to the murder of Michael Brown to the election of Donald Trump. Together, the lives and reflections in these pages offer a portrait of a generation on the brink, tracing their efforts to build their own futures and write their own history. (publ.)

Description: Between 1996 and 2017, the number of families on welfare declined to less than a quarter of its former rate of coverage, yet nearly twice as many households live in extreme poverty and nearly 25 percent of American children live in poverty. What can be done to help these children and families escape poverty? Are government programs like welfare the best solution, or are there other ways to pull families out of poverty? This volume looks at the issue of poverty, the various theories about why it proliferates, and a number of proposed strategies to fight it. (publ.)
Note: Standing Order.

Description: At the heart of developed societies lies an insatiable drive for wealth and prosperity. Yet in a world ruled by free-market economics, there are always winners and losers. The benefits enjoyed by the privileged few come at the expense of the many. In this important new book, Stephan Lessenich shows how our wealth and affluence are built overwhelmingly at the expense of those in less-developed countries and regions of the world. His theory of “externalization” demonstrates how the negative consequences of our lifestyles are directly transferred onto the world’s poorest. From the destruction of habitats caused by the massive increase in demand for soy and palm oil to the catastrophic impact of mining, Lessenich shows how the Global South has borne the brunt of our success. Yet, as we see from the mass movements of people across the world, we can no longer ignore the environmental and social toll of our prosperity. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und Ihr Preis (München: Hanser Berlin, 2016).

Reviewed: PW 12 Nov. 2018 p. 54; Choice (May 2019 vol. 56 no. 9) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there's an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that's right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to under-standing the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: A powerful look at a group of people we rarely hear about–those who have formerly been on the streets–sharing the details of their lives to help individuals, organizations, and communities learn to better support the ongoing challenges of homelessness. Research suggests that between 6 and 14 percent of the US population has been homeless at some point in their lives–a huge number of people. The authors share the stories of people who have formerly been homeless to examine how they transition off the streets, find housing, and stay housed. It offers a unique perspective of people who have managed to change their lives, the resources they needed, and the factors that contributed to lasting change. The book profiles men and women of different races and ages across the country, and it shares stories of people who have been off the streets from two months to twenty years. It addresses topics such as addiction, mental health, income–from formal employment and off-the-books work, and community resources. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 15 Feb. 2019 p. 3.
Description: In this valuable and timely anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay has collected original and previously published pieces that ad-dress what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are “routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, and bullied” for speaking out. Highlighting the stories of well-known actors, writers, and experts, as well as new voices being published for the first time, this book covers a wide range of topics and experiences, from an exploration of the rape epidemic embedded in the refugee crisis to first-person accounts of child molestation and street harassment. Often deeply personal and always unflinchingly honest, this collection both reflects the world we live in and offers a call to arms insisting that “not that bad” must no longer be good enough. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 16 Sept. 2018 p. 19; LJ Aug. 2018 p. 111; PW 16 July 2018 p. 57; NYRB 18 Apr. 2019 p. 26; Choice (Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done? In this book, Eric Klinenberg suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. Klinenberg calls this the “social infrastructure”: When it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves. (publ.)
“…Klinenberg finds in libraries ‘the textbook example of social infrastructure in action,’ a shared space where everyone from schoolchildren doing homework to the video-gaming elderly can get to know one another better. For him, the presence of destitute or mentally ill visitors is a feature, not a bug, of libraries, because it requires people to confront radical differences in a shared space.” (NYT)

Reviewed: PW 13 May 2019 p. 40.
Description: Whenever you go to your local public library, send mail via the post office, or visit Yosemite, you are taking advantage of a longstanding American tradition: the public option. Some of the most useful and be-loved institutions in American life, from public schools to museums, are public options–yet they are seldom celebrated as such. These government-supported opportunities co-exist peaceably alongside private options, ensuring equal access and expanding opportunity for all. Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott challenge decades of received wisdom about the proper role of government, inviting us to look past the political red herrings peddled by the right (and sometimes the left) and consider the vast improvements that could come from the expansion of public options. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 19 May 2019 p. SR3 (author op./ed.); NYT/BR 9 June 2019 p. 12; LJ June 2019 p. 135; TLS 15 Nov. 2019 p. 4.
Description: On the South Side of Chicago in 1974, Linda Taylor reported a phony burglary, concocting a lie about stolen furs and jewelry. The detective who checked it out soon discovered she was a welfare cheat who drove a Cadillac to collect ill-gotten government checks. And that was just the beginning: Taylor, it turned out, was also a kidnapper, and possibly a murderer. A desperately ill teacher, a combat-traumatized Marine, an elderly woman hungry for companionship–after Taylor came into their lives, all three ended up dead under suspicious circumstances. But nobody–not the journalists who touted her story, not the police, and not presidential candidate Ronald Reagan–seemed to care about anything but her welfare thievery. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Taylor was made an outcast because of the color of her skin. As she rose to infamy, the press and politicians manipulated her image to demonize poor black women. Part social history, part true-crime investigation, Josh Levin’s mesmerizing book, the product of six years of reporting and research, is a fascinating account of American racism, and an expose of the “welfare queen” myth, one that fueled political debates that reverberate to this day. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 books recommended as essential for community college libraries.
Description: Developmental equality–whether every child has an equal opportunity to reach their fullest potential–is essential for children’s future growth and access to opportunity. In the United States, however, children of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, poor educational out-comes, and structural discrimination, limiting their potential. In this book, Nancy E. Dowd sets out to examine the roots of these inequalities by tracing the life course of black boys from birth to age 18 in an effort to create an affirmative system of rights and support for all children. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Dec. 2018/Jan. 2019 p. 62.
Description: This book offers a framework for understanding recent moral conflicts at U.S. universities, which have bled into society at large. These are not the familiar clashes between liberals and conservatives or the religious and the secular: instead, they are clashes between a new moral culture–victimhood culture–and a more traditional culture of dignity. Even as students increasingly demand trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” many young people are quick to police the words and deeds of others, who in turn claim that political correctness has run amok. Interestingly, members of both camps often consider themselves victims of the other. In tracking the rise o f vi-timhood culture, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning help to decode an often dizzying cultural milieu, from campus riots over conservative speakers and debates around free speech to the election of Donald Trump. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 June 2018 p. 110; PW 30 Apr. 2018 p. 56.
Description: Families today are squeezed on every side–from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects–from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses–have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t sup-port them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. (publ.)

Description: Award-winning Congolese author Alain Mabanckou explores what it means to be black in the world today. Mabanckou confronts the long and entangled history of Africa, France, and the United States as it has been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and their legacy today. Without ignoring the injustices and prejudice still facing blacks, he distances himself from resentment and victimhood, arguing that focusing too intensely on the crimes of the past is limiting. Instead, it is time to ask: Now what? Embracing the challenges faced by ethnic minority communities today, Mabanckou looks to the future, choosing to believe that the history of Africa has yet to be written and seeking a path toward affirmation and reconciliation. (publ.)
Note: Originally published as: Le Sanglot de l’Homme Noir (Paris: Fayard, 2012).

Review: TLS 22 Mar. 2019 p. 3; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 104; LR March 2019 p. 46.
Description: From childhood on, we’re barraged by messages that it’s sad to be old. That wrinkles are embarrassing, and old people useless. Author and activist Ashton Applewhite believed them too until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, this book traces Applewhite’s journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. The book explains the roots of ageism in history and in our own age denial and how it divides and debases, examines how ageist myths and stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of elders as bur-dens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and concludes with a rousing call to action. It’s time to create a world of age equality by making discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec 2018 vol. 56 no. 4) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Ann Travers shows that from very early ages, some as young as two and three years old, trans kids find themselves to be different from the sex category that was assigned to them at birth. How they make their voices heard–to their parents and friends, in the schools, in public spaces, and through the courts–is the focus of this remarkable and groundbreaking book. Based on interviews with transgender kids, ranging in age from 4 to 20, and their parents, and over five years of research in the US and Canada, this book offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a trans child. From daycare to birthday parties and from the playground to the school bathroom, Travers takes the reader inside the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the restrictive ways in which sex categories regulate their lives and put pressure on them to deny their internal sense of who they are in gendered terms. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 4 Mar. 2019 p. 74.
Description: From the row houses of Baltimore to the stoops of Brooklyn, with searing conviction and full compassion, D. Watkins, New York Times bestselling author lays bare the voices of the most vulnerable and allows their raw, intimate stories to uncover the systematic injustice threaded within our society. Honest and eye-opening, this book makes us listen, feel, and create a course toward change that starts right where we are. Watkins introduces you to Down Bottom, the storied community of East Baltimore that holds a mirror to America’s poor black neighborhoods–“hoods” that could just as easily be in Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, or Atlanta. As Watkins sees it, the perspective of people who live in economically disadvantaged black communities is largely absent from the commentary of many top intellectuals who speak and write about race. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 June 2018 p. 99.
Description: Polls are everywhere these days, and they’re trying to tell us more than just who’s up and who’s down. As Elections and Surveys Director for CBS News, it’s Anthony Salvanto’s job to understand you–what you think and how you vote. He’s the person behind so many of the poll numbers you see today. In this book, Salvanto takes you on an engaging, fast-paced tour in-side the world of polling and shows how to look at the numbers the way the pros do. Salvanto demystifies the jargon of polling and answers some of its biggest mysteries. How can pollsters talk to 1,000 people and claim to know the country? How do they decide who gets interviewed, what questions to ask–and why didn’t they call you? How do they know the winner so quickly on election nights? And what's the difference between a poll and a prediction, anyway? Salvanto also addresses an even bigger question: Is America truly as divided as it seems? (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 6 July 2018 p. 3
Description: Provides a comprehensive and accessible exploration of white working-class politics and the populism that is transforming the transatlantic social and political landscape. In recent years, the world has been reintroduced to the constituency of “white working-class” people. In a wave of revolutionary populism, far right parties have scored victories across the transatlantic political world: Britain voted to leave the European Union, the United States elected President Donald Trump to enact an “America First” agenda, and Radical Right movements are threatening European centrists in elections across the continent. In each case, white working-class people are driving the reaction to the social change brought by globalization. In the midst of this rebellion, a new group consciousness has emerged among the very people who not so long ago could take their political, economic, and cultural primacy for granted. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 26 Aug. 2018 p. SR3 (Excerpt/Op. ed.); NYT/BR 26 Aug 2018 p. 1; Economist 26 Jan. 2019 p. 76; PW 2 July 2018 p. 61; Choice (Feb. 2019 vol. 56 no. 6) Top 75 books for community college libraries; TLS 6 Dec. 2019 p. 4.
Description: Former New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity. Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? He also points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world. A call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike. (publ.)

Description: After four decades of mass incarceration in the U.S., the disproportionate number of black men in prisons has contributed to an epidemic of black women struggling to support fragile families. Yet the literature is scant on how African American women are affected by the imprisonment of their partners. Drawing on case studies and firsthand accounts, the author brings needed perspective to the political, economic and psychological challenges they face. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR 4/2018 p. 59; LRB 21 Jan. 2021 p. 35 (reference).
Description: Sue Black confronts death every day. As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, she focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment, and when investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident or natural dis-aster. In this book she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her. (publ.)

Description: In a modern world that has been taken over by experts and professionals, Andy Merrifield argues that we have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.

Reviewed: TLS 26 Jan. 2018 p. 4
Description: How and when did Americans become associated with being nice? Carrie Tirado Bramen argues that in the nineteenth century niceness became an indispensable part of a democratic personality that was friendly and accessible, free from the Old World snobbery of a class-ridden society. It defined the geist of a white settler nation based on transience and cohered through a common affect that Bramen calls “manifest cheerfulness.” American niceness has figured in a national fantasy of American exceptionalism, based neither exclusively nor even primarily on military might and economic prowess, but on more mundane attributes such as friendliness. The distinctiveness of Americans has been largely shaped through the language of sociality and the importance of likability. (publ.)

Note Library Standing Order.

Reviewed: CHE 29 Apr. 2018 (online; book excerpt); LJ 15 Apr. 2018 p. 83.
Description: When George Yancy penned a New York Times article entitled “Dear White America,” he knew that he was courting controversy. Here, Yancy chronicles the ensuing blowback as he seeks to understand what it was that created so much rage among so many white readers. He challenges white Americans to develop a new empathy for the African American experience. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (New books); Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Recommended for community college libraries.
Description: What is it about basketball that makes it “the black man’s game?” And what about pickup basketball in particular: can it tell us something about the state of blackness in the United States? Reflecting on these questions, Rafik Mohamed presents pickup games as a text of the political, social, and economic struggles of African American men. In the process, he tells a story about race in its peculiarly American context, and about how the politics of race—and resistance—are mediated through sports. A. Rafik Mohamed is professor of sociology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at California State University San Bernardino.

Reviewed: CHE 22 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Reveals the underlying centrality of “blood” that shaped official ideas about who was eligible to be defined as Indian by the General Allotment Act in the United States. Katherine Ellinghaus traces the idea of blood quantum and how the concept came to dominate Native identity and national status between 1887 and 1934 and how related exclusionary policies functioned to dispossess Native people of their land. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Dec. 2017 vol. 55 no. 4 (Recommended for community college libraries); LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 34.
Description: Today’s inequality is on a scale that none of us has seen in our lifetimes, yet this disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. Psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically, but also has pro-found consequences for how we think, how our cardiovascular systems respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and how we view moral ideas such as justice and fairness. (publ.)

Description: Considers death and dying from every angle in the Western tradition, exploring how humans understand and come to terms with the end of life.

Description: Why are poor Americans so patriotic? They have significantly worse social benefits compared to other Western nations, and studies show that the American Dream of upward mobility is, for them, largely a myth. So why do these people love their country? Why have they not risen up to demand more from a system that is failing them? Sociologist Francesco Duina contends that the best way to answer these questions is to speak directly to America’s most impoverished. Spending time in bus stations, laundromats, senior citizen centers, homeless shelters, public libraries, and fast food restaurants, Duina conducted over sixty revealing interviews in which his subjects explain how they view themselves and their country. (publ.)

Description: This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and something we should all just “get over”" The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, “slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.” (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Nov. 2017 p. 92
Description: Focuses on the period from the 1950s through the present, when sex toys evolved from symbols of female emancipation to tools in the fight against HIV/AIDS to consumerist marital aids and finally to mainstays of today’s pop culture. Lieberman’s history is populated by vivid and fascinating characters, including Ted Marche, an entrepreneurial ventriloquist and dildo maker; Duane Coleglazier, the gay ice cream truck driver who founded the first boutique sex-toy store; Dell Williams, ex-communist advertising maven who created the feminist sex toy store; Betty Dodson, whose workshops helped 1960s women discover vibrators; and Gosnell Duncan, a paraplegic engineer who invented the silicone dildo. And these personal dramas are all set against a backdrop of changing American attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, LGBTQ issues, and more. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 14 July 2017 (new books)
Description: Are sex workers victims, criminals, or just trying to make a living? Over the last five years, public policy and academic discourse have moved from criminalization of sex workers to victim-based understanding, shaped by human trafficking. While most research focuses on macro-level policies and theories, less is known about the on-the-ground perspectives of people whose lives are impacted by sex work, including attorneys, social workers, police officers, probation officers, and sex workers themselves. [This book] brings the voices of lower-echelon sex workers and those individuals charged with policy development and enforcement into conversation with one another. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: NYT 16 June 2017 p. A27 (ref. op/ed piece; David Brooks)
Description: A strikingly rich, paradigm-shifting look at fatherhood among inner-city men often dismissed as “deadbeat dads.” Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson examine how couples in challenging straits come together and get pregnant so quickly-without planning. The authors chronicle the high hopes for forging lasting family bonds that pregnancy inspires, and pinpoint the fatal flaws that often lead to the relationship's demise. They offer keen insight into a radical redefinition of family life, where ties between parents are peripheral and the father-child bond is central. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 2 July 2017 p. 27
Description: In 1970s America, politicians began “getting tough” on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation’s penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era’s social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the ruin of the nation’s welfare programs developed hand in hand. The author shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 10 Nov. 2017 p. 33 (mentioned)
Description: In 1947, Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio, the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown thirty-five years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion. (publ.)

Reviewed: FA 96(5) Sept./Oct. 2017 p. 151; TLS 22 Sept. 2017 p. 10; Financial Times/McKinsey & Co. 2017 Business Book of the Year Award Finalist; LRB 19 Oct. 2017 p. 23; Economist 9 Dec. 2017 p. 83 (2017 Books of the Year); Economist 4 Mar. 2018 p. 67.
Description: Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 9 June 2017 (new books)
Description: Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? Terence Young would say: all of the above. Camping is one of the country’s most popular pastimes—tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. Whether on foot, on horseback, or in RVs, campers have been enjoying themselves for well more than a century, during which time camping’s appeal has shifted and evolved. In Heading Out, Young takes readers into nature and explores with them the history of camping in the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 110; NYT/BR 15 Apr. 2018 p. 21.
Description: Tells the story of America’s public housing experiment and the changing fortunes of American cities. It is an account told movingly through the lives of residents who struggled to make a home for their families as powerful forces converged to accelerate the housing complex’s demise. Beautifully written, rich in detail, and full of moving portraits, High-Risers is a sweeping exploration of race, class, popular culture, and politics in modern America that brilliantly considers what went wrong in our nation’s effort to provide affordable housing to the poor—and what we can learn from those mistakes. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: PW 18 Dec. 2018 p. 119;TLS 19 Jan 2018 p. 26; NYT/BR 15 Apr. 2018 p. 19.
Description: What is anthropology? What can it tell us about the world? Why, in short, does it matter? For well over a century, cultural anthropologists have circled the globe, from Papua New Guinea to suburban England and from China to California, uncovering surprising facts and insights about how humans organize their lives and articulate their values. In the process, anthropology has done more than any other discipline to reveal what culture means–and why it matters. By weaving together examples and theories from around the world, Matthew Engelke provides a lively, accessible, and at times irreverent introduction to anthropology, covering a wide range of classic and contemporary approaches, subjects, and practitioners. Presenting a set of memorable cases, he encourages readers to think deeply about some of the key concepts with which anthropology tries to make sense of the world—from culture and nature to authority and blood. Along the way, he shows why anthropology matters: not only because it helps us understand other cultures and points of view but also because, in the process, it reveals something about ourselves and our own cultures, too. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 26 Mar. 2018 p. 110; LJ 15 Apr. 2018 p. 82; PW 15 Oct. 2018 p. 56
Description: Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct. 2017 vol. 55 no. 2 (Highly Recommend-ed)
Description: Offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to deemphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Nov. 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (Essential; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Author Eric Love shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Apr. 2018 vol. 55 no. 8 (recommended for community college libraries).
Description: From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. Latino population increased by 44 percent. It grew even more–by more than 73 percent–in eight out of twelve Midwestern states over the same years. This interdisciplinary anthology of essays examines the history, education, literature, art, and politics of Latinos in the Midwest in view of the demographic changes experienced by states in this region with growing Latino populations and the recent immigration raids in the Midwest. Through brief readings on topics ranging from immigration to labor history and expressive culture, the anthology sheds light on the region’s history, as well as its cultural dynamics, population shifts, and social movements based in labor, religion, and civil rights. (publ.)

Description: Provides a wide-ranging, multifaceted exploration of Latino American history and culture, as well as the forces shaping this minority group in the U.S. From exploring the origins of the term “Latino” and examining what constitutes Latin America, to tracing topical issues like DREAMers, the mass incarceration of Latino males, and the controversial relationship between Latin America and the United States, Ilan Stavans seeks to understand the complexities and unique position of Latino Americans. Throughout he breaks down the various subgroups within the Latino minority (Mexican-Americans, Dominican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans on the mainland, and so on), and the degree to which these groups constitute–or don’t–a homogeneous community, their history, and where their future challenges lie. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 20 Apr. 2018 (new books).
Description: What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order–the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully. We hear from farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities’ needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. (publ.)

Note: Standing Order Series.

Reviewed: CHE 14 July 2017 (new books)
Description: Intentional residential communities across the United States are seeking the freedom to craft their own societies and live out Gandhi’s vision of democracy based on the values of nonviolence, self-sufficiency, equality, and voluntary simplicity. …In this book, Sanford reveals the solutions that these communities have devised for sustainable living while highlighting the specific choices and adaptations that they have made to accommodate local context and geography. She examines their methods of reviving and adapting traditional agrarian skills, testing alternate building materials for their homes, and developing local governments that balance group needs and individual autonomy. (publ.)

Description: While the world has made encouraging strides in the fight against global poverty, there is a hidden crisis silently undermining our best efforts to help the poor. It is a plague of everyday violence. Beneath the surface of the world’s poorest communities, common violence, like rape, forced labor, illegal detention, land theft, police abuse and other brutality, has become routine and relentless. And like a horde of locusts devouring everything in their path, the unchecked plague of violence ruins lives, blocks the road out of poverty, and undercuts development. How has this plague of violence grown so ferocious? The answer is terrifying, and startlingly simple: There is nothing shielding the poor from violent people. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 4 June 2017 p. SR3 (author op/ed)
Description: When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case--the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America's original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of “nonwhite blood” merited exclusion from full citizenship. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 32.
Description: Stereotypes of economically marginalized black and brown youth focus on drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood. Families, schools, nonprofit organizations, and institutions in poor urban neighborhoods emphasize preventing such “risk behaviors.” Ranita Ray uncovers the pernicious consequences of concentrating on risk behaviors as key to targeting poverty. Having spent three years among sixteen black and Latina/o youth, Ray shares their stories of trying to beat the odds of living in poverty. Their struggles of hunger, homelessness, and untreated illnesses are juxtaposed with the perseverance of completing homework, finding jobs, and spending long hours traveling from work to school to home. By focusing on the lives of youth who largely avoid drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood, the book challenges the idea that targeting these “risk behaviors” is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice May 2018 vol. 55 no. 9 (Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: This study examines the Hmong community’s role in the US war in Laos and their eventual resettlement in the United States. In particular, it analyzes their process of acculturation into American society since the 1970s, their reception by the American people and government, and the creation of Hmong enclaves throughout the country. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: Choice May 2018 vol. 55 no. 9 (Essential; recommended for community college libraries)
Description: Synthesizes recent findings from genetics (including the rapidly growing body of ancient DNA), the human fossil record, and archaeology relating to the African origin and global dispersal of anatomically modern people. Hoffecker places humans in the broad context of the evolution of life, emphasizing the critical role of genetic and non-genetic forms of information in living systems as well as how changes in the storage, transmission, and translation of information underlie major transitions in evolution. He also draws on information and complexity theory to explain the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa several hundred thousand years ago and the rapid and unprecedented spread of our species into a variety of environments in Australia and Eurasia, including the Arctic and Beringia, beginning between 75,000 and 60,000 years ago. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 4 Feb. 2018 p. SR10 (author op/ed); LJ Jan. 2018 p. 114; Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: They are often seen in photos of crowds in the mid-century South–white women shooting down blacks with looks of pure hatred. Yet it is the male white supremacists who have been the focus of the literature on white resistance to Civil Rights. This groundbreaking first book recovers the daily workers who upheld the system of segregation and Jim Crow for so long–white women. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 23 Dec. 2017 p. 25 (article mention)
Description: Drawing on decades of research, Barash presents a remarkable array of scientific evidence from evolutionary biology and cross-cultural studies that guide the reader through the hidden impacts of polygamy on such crucial behavior as violence, parenting, sexual preferences, adultery and efforts at monogamy itself, along with mind-bending speculation about the possible role of our polygamous predisposition when it comes to human genius, homosexuality and even monotheism. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct. 2017 vol. 55 no. 2 (Essential; Top 75 Titles recommended for community college libraries)
Description: An account of both the historical and current struggle of Native Americans to recover sacred objects that have been plundered and sold to museums. Museum curator and anthropologist Chip Colwell asks the all-important question: Who owns the past? Museums that care for the objects of history or the communities whose ancestors made them? (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: LJ 15 Nov. 2017 p. 94
Description: Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being “postracial” we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their prejudice. When a recent Oxford study claimed to have found a drug that reduced implicit bias, it was only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis–and solution–for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices? (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 15 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: America’s rural areas have always held a disproportionate share of the nation’s poorest populations. Rural Poverty in the United States examines why. What is it about the geography, demography, and history of rural communities that keeps them poor? In a comprehensive analysis that extends from the Civil War to the present, this book looks at access to human and social capital; food security; healthcare and the environment; homelessness; gender roles and relations; racial inequalities; and immigration trends to isolate the underlying causes of persistent rural poverty. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 27 Apr. 2018 (New Books)
Description: Illuminating the complex relationships between tribal inform-ants and twentieth-century anthropologists such as Boas, Parker, and Fenton, who came to their communities to collect stories and artifacts. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 19 Nov. 2017 p. SR 3 (author op/ed); PW 18 Dec. 2018 p. 117; NYT/BR 1 Apr. 2018 p. 12; NPR ("Fresh Air" 3/19/2018)
Description: Weisman explores the disconnect between his own sense of Jewish identity and the expectations of his detractors and supporters. He delves into the rise of the Alt Right, their roots in older anti-Semitic organizations, the odd ancientness of their grievances—cloaked as they are in contemporary, techy hipsterism—and their aims—to spread hate in a palatable way through a political structure that has so suddenly become tolerant of their views. He concludes with what we should do next, realizing that vicious as it is, anti-Semitism must be seen through the lens of more pressing threats. He proposes a unification of American Judaism around the defense of self and of others even more vulnerable: the undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslim Americans, and black activists who have been directly targeted, not just by the tolerated Alt Right, but by the Trump White House itself. (publ.)

Description: Sets out to illuminate the lives and hopes of these small-town residents. The people featured live—by choice or circumstances—in one of nine small communities in five states in the Midwest and Great Plains: Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Daily they witness people moving out, heading to more urban areas, small businesses closing down, connected infrastructure drying up, entrepreneurs becoming discouraged, and more people thinking about leaving. This is the story we hear in the news, the story told by abandoned farms, consolidated schools, and boarded-up Main Streets. But it’s not the whole story. As Couch found in her travels throughout the Midwest, many people long to return to these towns, places where they may have deep family roots or where they can enjoy short commutes, familiar neighbors, and proximity to rural and wild places. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 13 Nov. 2017 p. 54; LJ Dec. 2017 p. 112
Description: Editor at Large of the website, The Establishment, Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. She is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged issues in America. Her messages are passionate but finely tuned, and crystallize ideas that would otherwise be vague by empowering them with aha-moment clarity. Her writing brings to mind voices like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti in Full Frontal Feminism, and a young Gloria Naylor, particularly in Naylor’s seminal essay “The Meaning of a Word.” (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 11 Aug. 2017 (new books).
Description: Presents a survey of the ethnoastronomy of the nineteenth-century Lakota and relates Lakota astronomy to their cultural practices and beliefs. The center of Lakota belief is the unfathomable and sacred nature of the world in which they live and of the stars above–extraordinary and wakhán (mysterious)–both of which constitute an integral part of this holistic world. Mark Hollabaugh offers a detailed analysis of all aspects of Lakota culture that have a bearing on their astronomy, including telling time, Lakota names for the stars and constellations as they appeared on the Great Plains, and the phenomena of meteor showers, eclipses, and the aurora borealis. Hollabaugh’s explanation of the cause of the aurora that occurred at the death of Black Elk in 1950 is a new contribution to ethnoastronomy. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 6 Sept. 2017 (book review)
Description: Some of the literary world’s most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 13 Oct. 2017 p. 36; Economist 1 Apr. 2018 p. 76.
Description: Challenges conventional beliefs about evolutionary factors that are used to justify gender politics, outlining arguments against cultural stereotypes, in a call for a more equal society that recognizes the potential of both sexes. Many people believe that, at its core, biological sex is a fundamental, diverging force in human development. According to this overly familiar story, differences between the sexes are shaped by past evolutionary pressures–women are more cautious and parenting-focused, while men seek status to attract more mates. …Psychologist Cordelia Fine wittily explains why past and present sex roles are only serving suggestions for the future, revealing a much more dynamic situation through an entertaining and well-documented exploration of the latest research that draws on evolutionary science, psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and philosophy. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Recommended)
Description: This approach to the immigration debate takes the reader behind the blaring headlines and into communities grappling with the reality of new immigrants and the changing nature of American identity. Ali Noorani, the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, interviews nearly fifty local and national leaders from law enforcement, business, immigrant, and faith communities to illustrate the challenges and opportunities they face. From high school principals to church pastors to sheriffs, the author reveals that most people are working to advance society's interests, not exploiting a crisis at the expense of one community. As he shows, some cities and regions have reached a happy conclusion, while others struggle to find balance. Whether describing a pastor preaching to the need to welcome the stranger, a sheriff engaging the Muslim community, or a farmer's wind-whipped face moistened by tears as he tells the story of his farmworkers being deported, the author helps readers to realize that America's immigration debate isn't about policy; it is about the culture and values that make America what it is. The people on the front lines of America's cultural and demographic debate are Southern Baptist pastors in South Carolina, attorneys general in Utah or Indiana, Texas businessmen, and many more. Their combined voices make clear that all of them are working to make America a welcome place for everyone, long-established citizens and new arrivals alike. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 20 May 2018 p. 9.
Description: Super Bowl Champion and three-time Pro Bowler Michael Bennett is an outspoken proponent for social justice and a man without a censor. He is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, a grassroots philanthropist, an organizer, and a change maker. He’s also one of the most scathingly humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable. Bennett adds his unmistakable voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Apr. 2018 p. 33.
Description: Since the Great Recession, most Americans’ standard of living has stagnated or declined. Economic inequality is at historic highs. But inequality’s impact differs by race; African Americans’ net wealth is just a tenth that of white Americans, and over recent decades, white families have accumulated wealth at three times the rate of black families. In our increasingly diverse nation, sociologist Thomas M. Shapiro argues, wealth disparities must be understood in tandem with racial inequities–a dangerous combination he terms “toxic inequality.” (publ.)

Description: Drawing on over one hundred interviews with individuals, this book is a compilation of the voices of those who have decided to undergo transition–both male-to-female and female-to-male. The book details the diverse experiences and challenges faced by those who transition, exploring a range of topics such as hormone treatments; reassignment surgeries; coming out; sex and sexuality; physical, emotional and mental health; transphobia; discrimination; and hate crime, as well as highlighting the lives of non-binary individuals and those who cross-dress to form a wider understanding of the varied ways in which people experience gender. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 5 Mar. 2018 p. 63.
Description: All groups tell stories, but some groups have the power to impose their stories on others, to label others, stigmatize others, paint others as undesirables–and to have these stories presented as scientific fact, God’s will, or wholesome entertainment. This book examines the origins and significance of several longstanding antiblack stories and the caricatures and stereotypes that support them. Here readers will find representations of the lazy, childlike Sambo, the watermelon-obsessed pickaninny, the buffoonish minstrel, the subhuman savage, the loyal and contented mammy and Tom, and the menacing, razor-toting coon and brute. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 18/25 Aug. 2017 p. 36.
Description: Born in 1954, Cleve Jones was among the last generation of gay Americans who grew up wondering if there were others out there like himself. There were. Like thousands of other young people, Jones, nearly penniless, was drawn in the early 1970s to San Francisco, a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual freedom. He found community--in the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the city’s bathhouses and bars like The Stud, and in the burgeoning gay district, the Castro, where a New York transplant named Harvey Milk set up a camera shop, began shouting through his bullhorn, and soon became the nation’s most outspoken gay elected official. With Milk’s encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in “the movement.” When Milk was killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentor’s progressive mantle--only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 111
Description: Award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote on her blog about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren’t affected by it. Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanized, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge has written a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary examination of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Jun 2017 vol. 54 no. 10 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Collections)

Reviewed: Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries)

Reviewed: LR Nov. 2016 p. 48

Reviewed: CHE 10 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: NYRB 22 Dec. 2016 p. 89.
Description: "All men are created equal" is America's most cherished proposition. But for more than a century after Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, the Founding Fathers and their successors failed to extend the promise of the Declaration of Independence to blacks and Indians. Why? We take refuge in the notion that white people at the time were the prisoners of racist ideas and that we today are more enlightened. In this popular view, the history of America demonstrates how racist beliefs have been slowly discarded, with later generations realizing the dream of liberty and equality. But as Nick Guyatt argues in this book, white Americans from the founding to the Civil War were not confident racists who blithely condemned blacks and Indians to inferior status. Instead, they were confused and tortured souls, and often remarkably conscious of the damage that racism might do to the nation's future. They looked for ways to reconcile their principles and their prejudices, and sometimes succeeded: in the first decades of the United States, blacks went to the polls alongside whites in some northern states, and federal officials promoted intermarriage between Indians and frontier settlers in the hope that racial divisions would disappear in the West. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 25 Nov. 2016 p. 14 (2016 Books of the Year)
Description: Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the twentieth century was home to a large African American community that included ministers and teachers, farmers and field hands, tradesmen, servants, and children. Many black residents were poor sharecroppers, but others owned their own farms and the land on which they'd founded the county's thriving black churches. But then in September of 1912, three young black laborers were accused of raping and murdering a white girl. Soon bands of white 'night riders' launched a coordinated campaign of arson and terror, driving all 1,098 black citizens out of the county. In the wake of the expulsions, whites harvested the crops and took over the livestock of their former neighbors, and quietly laid claim to 'abandoned' land. The charred ruins of homes and churches disappeared into the weeds, until the people and places of black Forsyth were forgotten, as locals kept Forsyth 'all white' well into the 1990s. Blood at the Root is a sweeping American tale that spans the Cherokee removals of the 1830s, the hope and promise of Reconstruction, and the crushing injustice of Forsyth's racial cleansing. With bold storytelling and lyrical prose, Phillips breaks a century-long silence and uncovers a history of racial terrorism that continues to shape America in the twenty-first century. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 21 Apr. 2017 p. 28
Description: This book explores human remains as objects for research and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Influenced by early skull collectors such as Samuel George Morton, zealous scientists at museums in the United States established human skeletal collections. Museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Field Museum of Natural History established their own collections. Universities soon followed, with bones collected for Penn, Berkeley, and Harvard. American Indian remains collected from the American West arrived at museums at an increasingly fervent pace, and the project swiftly became global in scope. Coinciding with a high-water mark in Euro-American colonialism, collecting bones became a unique and evolving expression of colonialism experienced through archaeological, anthropological, and anatomical study of race and the body via work with human remains collections. In revealing this story, The Great Bone Race surveys shifts away from racial classification theories toward emerging ideas regarding human origins, arguing that the study of human remains contributed significantly to changing ideas about race and human history. These ideas were hotly contested, and competition to collect and exhibit rare human remains from around the world thrust ideas about race and history into the public realm through prominent museum displays visited by millions. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 May 2017 p. 7; Economist 13 May 2017 p. 74; LR June 2017 p. 40; WSJ 17/18 June 2017 p. C9

Description: Considers death and dying from every angle in the Western tradition, exploring how humans understand and come to terms with the end of life.

Reviewed: CHE 20 Jan. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)

Reviewed: NPR (“Morning Edition” 2 March 2017: America’s “Complacent Class”: How Self-Segregation Is Leading To Stagnation)
Description: Examines the trend of Americans away from the traditionally mobile, risk-accepting, and adaptable tendencies that defined them for much of recent history, and toward stagnation and comfort, and how this development has the potential to make future changes more disruptive. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 5 Jan. 2018 p. 10.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 20 Nov. 2016 p. 35

Reviewed: FA Mar./Apr. 2017 p. 60+ (Essay/Excerpt); Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12.
Note: “…Libraries, or at least their reference and academic sections, once served as a kind of first cut through the noise of the marketplace. The Internet, however, is less a library than a giant repository where anyone can dump anything. In practice, this means that a search for information will rely on algorithms usually developed by for-profit companies using opaque criteria. Actual research is hard and often boring. It requires the ability to find authentic information, sort through it, analyze it, and apply it.” (FA)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2016 p. 23; CHE 10 Mar. 2017

Description: This book questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H.A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the twentieth century–one in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, one in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, and one in Jasper, Texas, in 1998–to see how Americans developed two distinct ways of thinking and talking about this act before and after the 1930s. One way takes seriously the legal and moral concept of complicity as a way to understand the dynamics of a lynching; this way of thinking can give us new perceptions into the meaning of mobs and the lynching photographs in which we find them. Another way, which developed in the 1940s and continues to influence us today, uses a strategy of denial to claim that lynchings have ended. Rushdy examines how the denial of lynching emerged and developed, providing insight into how and why we talk about lynching the way we do at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, he forces us to confront our responsibilities as American citizens and as human beings. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2016 p. 25 (100 Notable Books 2016); NYT/BR 11 Dec. 2016 p. 12 (10 Best books of 2016); NYT 16 Dec. 2016 p. C28 (Top Books of 2016); NYT/BR 26 Feb. 2017 p. 24; Choice Sep 2016 vol. 54 no. 1 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community Colleges); NPR ("Fresh Air" 4/12/2018)
Description: Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the 20 dollars a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, "Love don't pay the bills." She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America's vast inequality ; and to people's determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. (publ.)

Description: Exploring white privilege is an enterprise few of us who identify as white have attempted. White privilege is a foreign territory to us, although an unpleasantly familiar territory to people of color. At first the exploration can seem threatening, frightening and uncomfortable because, like any exploration, it can shatter the way we look at the world and how we understand ourselves. This book is, in part, a personal exploration of the author’s white privilege and how he sought to transcend it. It is also a sociological analysis of white privilege, drawing upon key social science literature. The book is an invaluable tool for personal and group explorations of racial privilege as well as other forms of privilege, including gender. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 19 May 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 22
Description: In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew," which was later published in his landmark book, The Fire Next Time. Addressing his fifteen-year-old namesake on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote: "You know and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon." Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward knows that Baldwin's words ring as true as ever today. In response, she has gathered short essays, memoir, and a few essential poems to engage the question of race in the United States. And she has turned to some of her generation's most original thinkers and writers to give voice to their concerns. The book is divided into three parts that shine a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestle with our current predicament, and envision a better future. Of the eighteen pieces, ten were written specifically for this volume. In the fifty-odd years since Baldwin's essay was published, entire generations have dared everything and made significant progress. But the idea that we are living in the post-Civil Rights era, that we are a "post-racial" society is an inaccurate and harmful reflection of a truth the country must confront. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 25 May 2017 p. 42; NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 64.
Description: Lauren Greenfield: Generation Wealth is both a retrospective and an investigation into the subject of wealth over the last twenty-five years. … Provoking serious reflection, this book is not about the rich, but about the desire to be wealthy, at any cost. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2016 p. 25 (100 Notable Books 2016); NYT/BR 14 May 2017 p. 36

Reviewed: CHE 5 May 2017 (new books); Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Essential; Recommended for community college libraries)
Description: In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the US Army killed over two hundred Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek.

Reviewed: CHE 24 Mar. 2017 (new books); Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Recommended; recommended for community college library collections)

Reviewed: CHE 21 Apr. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: PW 17 Apr. 2017 p. 59
Description: In December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's Black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical Black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around. Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Death Blossoms, Live from Death Row, All Things Censored, and Writing on the Wall. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR March 2017; CHE 7 July 2017 (new books)
Description: Social and cultural historian Carole Dyhouse draws upon literature, cinema, and popular romance to show how the changing position of women has shaped their dreams about men, from Lord Byron in the early nineteenth century to boy-bands in the early twenty-first. … A great deal of feminist literature has shown women as objects of the “male gaze”: this book looks at men through the eyes of women.

Reviewed: CHE 3 Mar. 2017 (new books); Choice Aug 2017 vol. 54 no. 12 (Highly Recommended; recommended for community college libraries)

Reviewed: CHE 17 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: 10 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: TLS 4 Apr. 2017 p. 7
Description: The book begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa (Iowa City), and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.

Reviewed: WSJ 27/28 May 2017 p. C6

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Outstanding Academic Title; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries)

Description: Many Americans believe they're living in a post-racial society, pointing to the election of Barack Obama to the presidency as evidence. Others believe that, despite the advances achieved by the civil rights movement, people of color are treated as second-class citizens. Is race overemphasized in America? Have government programs and policies done enough to level the playing field? Can the United States, a country that lives by the credo that all men are created equal, ever overcome its legacy of racism? Readers of this multifaceted anthology will be given the tools to form their own opinions about these complex issues. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 2 Dec. 2016 p. 5; LR Dec./Jan. 2016/17 p. 59; PW 24 Apr. 2017 p. 84

Reviewed: TLS 21 Apr. 2017 p. 29 (referenced)
Description: The human head is exceptional. It accommodates four of our five senses, encases the brain, and boasts the most expressive set of muscles in the body. It is our most distinctive attribute and connects our inner selves to the outer world. Yet there is a dark side to the head’s preeminence, one that has, in the course of human history, manifested itself in everything from decapitation to headhunting. So explains anthropologist Frances Larson in this fascinating history of decapitated human heads. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 27 Nov. 2016 p. 1; Choice Nov 2016 vol. 54 no. 3 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title); LR Aug. 2017.
Note: Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2016.
Description: Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)

Reviewed: CHE 10 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: NPR 15 June 2017 ("Food for Thought") "Supersizing Urban America: How U.S. Policies Encouraged Fast Food To Spread.

Reviewed: NPR (29 Oct. 2016; “A Rather Mannered Plea for Etiquette)
Description: Table manners are tiny, above-ground traces of a larger, submerged system of ethics; they are tools for expressing what is important to us as a culture. (NPR)

Reviewed: CHE 10 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: CHE 31 Mar. 2017 (new books); Choice Sep 2017 vol. 55 no. 1 (Essential; Recommended for community college library collections)

Reviewed: CHE 20 Jan. 2017.
Description: In 1966, Allen Krause, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, conducted interviews with twelve Reform rabbis from various congregations throughout the South concerning their thoughts, principles, and activities as they related to the civil rights movement. ... The rabbis were extremely candid about their opinions and their own activities. The book's geographic scope is limited to the South–the rabbis interviewed served in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia–and the years between 1954 and 1967. ... While several of the rabbis interviewed stood up against the evils of the separate and unequal system, others made peace with it, or found reasons to justify inaction. ... In addition, the book provides a comparative framework for investigating the roles of other religious leaders in the civil rights movement. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 7 Apr. 2017 (new books)

Description: This book presents a systematic introduction to issues related to the sociology and social psychology of hate and violence as they target people who are different in socially significant ways. It offers an integrated perspective on the causes and consequences of hate–motivated violence and the reasons we have not always been effective in stopping it. Not only do the authors address the experiences of racial, ethnic, and religious groups under attack, but also those who are victimized because of their sexual orientation, gender, gender-identity, age, or disability status. In addition, they include a chapter dedicated solely to the exploration of hate crimes, an evolving legal concept and public policy domain, as well as a chapter in which they suggest approaches that may be effectively applied collectively to the reduction of hate violence. Levin and Nolan take the position that support for hate-motivated violence originates not in the ranting and raving of a few bigoted extremists at the margins of society but in the tacit approval of ordinary, even decent, people who are located squarely in the mainstream. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 15 November 2016 p. 100; NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2016 p. 26 (100 Notable Books 2016); NYRB 22 Dec. 2016 p. 32.

Description: Examining racial profiling in American politics, philosopher Naomi Zack argues against white privilege discourse while introducing a new theory of applicative justice. Drawing clear lines between rights and privileges and between justice and existing laws, and examining the legal structure that has permitted the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and others, Zack shows why it is more important to consider black rights than white privilege as the country moves forward through today's culture of inequality. (publ.)
Contents: (1) White privilege, entitlements, and rights; (2) Black rights and police racial profiling; (3) Black injustice and police homicide.

Reviewed: LRB 17 Aug. 2017 p. 19.