Best of
Humanities
2021
Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus
Jonathan Calvert - 2021
Instead he was fixated on Brexit, his own political destiny and a myriad of personal issues, all while presiding over the UK government’s botched response to the global coronavirus pandemic. After missing key Cobra meetings, embracing and abandoning herd immunity and dithering over lockdown, Johnson left the NHS facing an unmanageable deluge of patients. His inaction resulted in the deaths of many thousands of British people and his own hospitalisation at the hands of the pandemic, yet further reckless decisions allowed a deadly second wave to sweep across the country in the autumn months with the economy on the brink of collapse.With access to key figures at the top of government during the most tumultuous year of modern British history, Failures of State is an exhaustive and thrillingly told story – and one of the most essential pieces of investigative reporting for a generation.
Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year
Susie Dent - 2021
You'll never be lost for words again.
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
Winfred Rembert - 2021
He embraced the Civil Rights Movement, endured political violence, survived a lynching, and spent seven years in prison on a chain gang. Years later, seeking a fresh start at the age of 52, he discovered his gift and vision as an artist, and using leather tooling skills he learned in prison, started etching and painting scenes from his youth.Rembert's work has been exhibited at museums and galleries across the country, profiled in the New York Times and more, and honored by Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative. In Chasing Me to My Grave, he relates his life in prose and paintings—vivid, confrontational, revelatory, complex scenes from the cotton fields and chain gangs of the segregated south to the churches and night clubs of the urban north. This is also the story of finding epic love, and with it the courage to revisit a past that begs to remain buried, as told to Tufts philosopher Erin I. Kelly.
The Rise of Light
Olivia Hawker - 2021
In the town of Rexburg, Idaho, aspiring artist Aran Rigby, his younger sister, Tamsin, and their two brothers are locked in orbit around their emotionally abusive father. Gad is the kind of man who soothes the failures of his own life by controlling the lives of others. But Aran and Tamsin are united in rebellion against their father. They understand each other. They have dreams beyond their small town.Arriving in Rexburg is Linda Duff, an outsider from Seattle hoping to plant new roots far from the bitter ones of her childhood. She’s quickly taken with Aran, in no small part because of his talent. But when they fall in love, Linda is drawn into a family more damaged than the one she left behind. She also becomes privy to a secret Aran and Tamsin share that could dismantle everything everyone holds dear.Upsetting the precarious balance in the Rigby home, Linda becomes an unwitting catalyst for the upheaval of Gad’s oppression. Now it’s time for them all to break free of the past, overcome the unforgivable, and find a new way forward—whatever the price.
The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution
Nils Melzer - 2021
In July 2010, Wikileaks published Cablegate, one of the biggest leaks in the history of the US military, including evidence for war crimes and torture. In the aftermath Julian Assange, the founder and spokesman of Wikileaks, found himself at the centre of a media storm, accused of hacking and later sexual assault. He spent the next seven years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fearful that he would be extradited to Sweden to face the accusations of assault and then sent to US. In 2019, Assange was handed over to the British police and, on the same day, the U.S. demanded his extradition. They threatened him with up to 175 years in prison for alleged espionage and computer fraud.At this point, Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, started his investigation into how the US and UK governments were working together to ensure a conviction. His findings are explosive, revealing that Assange has faced grave and systematic due process violations, judicial bias, collusion and manipulated evidence. He has been the victim of constant surveillance, defamation and threats. Melzer also gathered together consolidated medical evidence that proves that the prison has suffered prolonged psychological torture.Melzer's compelling investigation puts the UK state into the dock, showing how, through secrecy, impunity and, crucially, public indifference, unchecked power reveals a deeply undemocratic system. Furthermore, the Assange case sets a dangerous precedent: once telling the truth becomes a crime, censorship and tyranny will inevitably follow.
The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider's Guide to Changing the World
Severine Autesserre - 2021
But what strategies have worked to build lasting peace in conflict zones, particularly for ordinary citizens on the ground? And why should other ordinary citizens, thousands of miles away, care?In The Frontlines of Peace, Severine Autesserre, award-winning researcher and peacebuilder, examines the well-intentioned but inherently flawed peace industry. With examples drawn from across the globe, she reveals that peace can grow in the most unlikely circumstances. Contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn't require billions in aid or massive international interventions. Real, lasting peace requires giving power to local citizens.The Frontlines of Peace tells the stories of the ordinary yet extraordinary individuals and organizations that are confronting violence in their communities effectively. One thing is clear: successful examples of peacebuilding around the world, in countries at war or at peace, have involved innovative grassroots initiatives led by local people, at times supported by foreigners, often employing methods shunned by the international elite. By narrating success stories of this kind, Autesserre shows the radical changes we must take in our approach if we hope to build lasting peace around us--whether we live in Congo, the United States, or elsewhere.
Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance
Mustafa Akyol - 2021
Diving deeply into Islamic theology, and also sharing lessons from his own life story, he reveals how Muslims lost the universalism that made them a great civilization in their earlier centuries. He especially demonstrates how values often associated with Western Enlightenment — freedom, reason, tolerance, and an appreciation of science — had Islamic counterparts, which sadly were cast aside in favor of more dogmatic views, often for political ends. Elucidating complex ideas with engaging prose and storytelling, Reopening Muslim Minds borrows lost visions from medieval Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes), to offer a new Muslim worldview on a range of sensitive issues: human rights, equality for women, freedom of religion, or freedom from religion. While frankly acknowledging the problems in the world of Islam today, Akyol offers a clear and hopeful vision for its future.
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World
Wil Haygood - 2021
Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read." --ShondalandThis unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies--from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther--using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown.Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation--which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster--Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves--including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others.An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.
The Colour of God
Ayesha S. Chaudhry - 2021
The author explores the joys and sorrows of growing up in a fundamentalist Muslim household, wedding grand historical narratives of colonialism and migration to the small intimate heartbreaks of modern life. In revisiting the beliefs and ideals she was raised with, Chaudhry invites us to reimagine our ideas of self and family, state and citizenship, love and loss.
The Truth about Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
Aja Raden - 2021
Probably a lot. We're always stunned when we realize we've been deceived. We can't believe we were fooled: What was I thinking? How could I have believed that?We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth? People tell you the truth all the time, and you believe them; and if, at some later point, you're confronted with evidence that the story you believed was indeed true, you never wonder why you believed it in the first place. In this incisive and insightful taxonomy of lies and liars, New York Times bestselling author Aja Raden makes the surprising claim that maybe you should.Buttressed by history, psychology, and science, The Truth About Lies is both an eye-opening primer on con-artistry--from pyramid schemes to shell games, forgery to hoaxes--and also a telescopic view of society through the mechanics of belief: why we lie, why we believe, and how, if at all, the acts differ. Through wild tales of cons and marks, Raden examines not only how lies actually work, but also why they work, from the evolutionary function of deception to what it reveals about our own.In her previous book, Stoned, Raden asked, "What makes a thing valuable?" In The Truth About Lies, she asks "What makes a thing real?" With cutting wit and a deft touch, Raden untangles the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda.The Truth About Lies will change everything you thought you knew about what you know, and whether you ever really know it.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
Elizabeth Catte - 2021
From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia’s twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling “troublesome” women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong, and yet today sites where it was practiced like Western State Hospital, in Staunton, VA, are rehabilitated as luxury housing, their histories hushed up in the service of capital. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got? And what possible interventions can be made now, repair their damage?
The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It
Jason Karlawish - 2021
While it is an account of decades of missed opportunities and our health care systems’ failures to take action, it tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated by medicine and also presents an argument for how we can live with dementia: the ways patients can reclaim their autonomy and redefine their sense of self, how families can support their loved ones, and the innovative reforms we can make as a society that would give caregivers and patients better quality of life.The Problem of Alzheimer's takes us inside laboratories, patients' homes, caregivers’ support groups, progressive care communities, and Jason Karlawish's own practice at the Penn Memory Center.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The mission to rescue the hostages the world forgot
Colin Freeman - 2021
All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them.At 65, Colonel Steed was hardly an ideal saviour. With no experience in hostage negotiations and no money behind him, he had to raise the ransom cash from scratch, running the operation from his spare room and ferrying million-dollar ransom payments around in the boot of his car.Drawing on first-hand interviews, former chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes readers on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man's heroic rescue mission.
Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature
Angus Fletcher - 2021
And the writers we revere—from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others—each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative and neuroscientific advancement. Literature’s great invention was to address problems we could not solve: not how to start a fire or build a boat, but how to live and love; how to maintain courage in the face of death; how to account for the fact that we exist at all. Wonderworks reviews the blueprints for twenty-five of the most significant developments in the history of literature. These inventions can be scientifically shown to alleviate grief, trauma, loneliness, anxiety, numbness, depression, pessimism, and ennui, while sparking creativity, courage, love, empathy, hope, joy, and positive change. They can be found throughout literature—from ancient Chinese lyrics to Shakespeare’s plays, poetry to nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and crime novels to slave narratives. A “refreshing and remarkable” (Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter) exploration of the new literary field of story science, Wonderworks teaches you everything you wish you learned in your English class, and “contains many instances of critical insight....What’s most interesting about this compendium is its understanding of imaginative representation as a technology” (The New York Times).
Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound
Daphne A. Brooks - 2021
Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry?Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers. Zora Neale Hurston appears as a sound archivist and a performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer Black feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism. She makes lyrical forays into the blues pioneers Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith, as well as fans who became critics, like the record-label entrepreneur and writer Rosetta Reitz. In the twenty-first century, pop superstar Janelle Monae's liner notes are recognized for their innovations, while celebrated singers Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rhiannon Giddens, and Valerie June take their place as cultural historians.With an innovative perspective on the story of Black women in popular music—and who should rightly tell it—Liner Notes for the Revolution pioneers a long overdue recognition and celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.
Whatever Happened to Tradition?: History, Belonging and the Future of the West
Tim Stanley - 2021
Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are behind us. The central argument of this book is that we can only face the future with hope if we have a proper sense of tradition – political, social and religious. We ignore our past at our peril. The problem, argues Tim Stanley, is that the Western tradition is anti-tradition, that we have a habit of discarding old ways and old knowledge, leaving us uncertain how to act or, even, of who we really are.In this wide-ranging book, we see how tradition can be both beautiful and useful, from the deserts of Australia to the court of nineteenth-century Japan. Some of the concepts defended here are highly controversial in the modern West: authority, nostalgia, rejection of self and the hunt for spiritual transcendence. We'll even meet a tribe who dress up their dead relatives and invite them to tea. Stanley illustrates how apparently eccentric yet universal principles can nurture the individual from birth to death, plugging them into the wider community, and creating a bond between generations. He also demonstrates that tradition, far from being pretentious or rigid, survives through clever adaptation, that it can be surprisingly egalitarian. The good news, he argues, is that it can also be rebuilt. It's been done before. The process is fraught with danger, but the ultimate prize of rediscovering tradition is self-knowledge and freedom.
Questions Raised by Quolls: Fatherhood and Conservation in an Uncertain World
Harry Saddler - 2021
We were cleaning up after dinner in the gathering dark, the pots and pans scraped empty but with traces of our meal still lingering, when we heard the noise of them: yapping calls, one to the other, or just to themselves in their excitement.’When Harry Saddler first encountered a quoll while camping with his father, he was struck by the beauty of the rare creature who had emerged fromthe bush, sniffing for dinner. As Harry frantically snapped a photo, the fast-moving mammal disappeared back into the undergrowth.Many years later that blurry photo remains a memory, as fleeting as the animal it captured. After two centuries of habitat destruction, quolls are now on the brink of extinction and Harry, contemplating fatherhood, aches for the absence of all the species lost to children born today.Questions Raised by Quolls is an eloquent examination of extinction and conservation set against the backdrop of global climate change. From his own family lineage, Harry reveals how humanity’s ever-accelerating modern way of life runs parallel with the destruction of the natural world. Evocative and challenging, this eulogy to lost species will force you to question your place in the vast interconnected web of life.
Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
Utsa Patnaik - 2021
Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book--winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award--radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics.Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today's neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. A few hundred years ago, write the Patnaiks, colonialism began to ensure vast, virtually free, markets for new products in burgeoning cities in the West. But even after slavery was generally abolished, millions of people in the Global South still fell prey to the continuing lethal exigencies of the marketplace. Evenafter the Second World War, when decolonization led to the end of the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism," neoliberal economies stepped in to reclaim the Global South, imposing drastic "austerity" measures on working people. But, say the Patnaiks, this neoliberal economy, which lives from bubble to bubble, is doomed to a protracted crisis. In its demise, we are beginning to see--finally--the transcendence of the capitalist system.
The Day I Fell Off My Island
Yvonne Bailey-Smith - 2021
When Erna is sent to England to be reunited with her siblings, she dreads leaving behind her elderly grandfather, and the only life she has ever known. A new future unfolds, in a strange country and with a mother she barely knows. The next decade will be a complex journey of estrangement and arrival, new beginnings, and the uncovering of long-buried secrets.
The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
Robert Zaretsky - 2021
In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycée students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was not sent to France to help the Resistance. Though Weil published little during her life, after her death, thanks largely to the efforts of Albert Camus, hundreds of pages of her manuscripts were published to critical and popular acclaim. While many seekers have been attracted to Weil’s religious thought, Robert Zaretsky gives us a different Weil, exploring her insights into politics and ethics, and showing us a new side of Weil that balances her contradictions—the rigorous rationalist who also had her own brand of Catholic mysticism; the revolutionary with a soft spot for anarchism yet who believed in the hierarchy of labor; and the humanitarian who emphasized human needs and obligations over human rights. Reflecting on the relationship between thought and action in Weil’s life, The Subversive Simone Weil honors the complexity of Weil’s thought and speaks to why it matters and continues to fascinate readers today.
A Season in lights
Gregory Erich Phillips - 2021
Yet the tug of familial obligation and the guilt of what she sacrificed to be there weigh down her dancing feet. Her lover, Tom, an older piano player, came to the city as a young man in the 1980s with a story eerily in tune with Cammie's own. Through their triumphs and failures, both learn the fleeting nature of glory, the sweetness of new love, and how a dream come true isn't cherished until it passes. The bright lights of the stage intoxicate, while degradation and despair lurk close behind the curtain. Their sagas are marred by two pandemics, AIDS in the 1980s and COVID-19 today, which ravaged the performing arts community, leaving a permanent scar on those who lived through them. The poignant intersection of their stories reveals a love affair unbound by time, reaching across decades through the notes of a piano's remembered song.
Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City
Samira Shackle - 2021
The capital of Pakistan is a sprawling mega-city of 20 million people. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force, a place in which it pays to have friends in the right places and to avoid making deadly enemies. It is a society where lavish wealth and absolute poverty live side by side, and where the lines between idealism and corruption can quickly blur. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick, and in this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother's birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites. Among them is Safdar the ambulance driver, who knows the city's streets and shortcuts intimately and will stop at nothing to help his fellow citizens. There is Parveen, the activist whose outspoken views on injustice corruption repeatedly lead her towards danger. And there is Zille, the hardened journalist whose commitment to getting the best scoops puts him at increasing risk. As their individual experiences unfold, so Shackle tells the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight. Writing with intimate local knowledge and a global perspective, Shackle paints a nuanced and vivid portrait of one of the most complex, most compelling cities in the world.
Effective Psychotherapists: Clinical Skills That Improve Client Outcomes
William R. Miller - 2021
Reviewing 70 years of psychotherapy research, the preeminent authors show that empathy, acceptance, warmth, focus, and other characteristics of effective therapists are both measurable and teachable. Richly illustrated with annotated sample dialogues, the book gives practitioners and students a blueprint for learning, practicing, and self-monitoring these crucial clinical skills.
King of Rabbits
Karla Neblett - 2021
A beautiful, painful, at times funny novel about how a little boy perceives the world, and how his environment leads him on a path to manhood he doesn't want to follow.Kai lives in a mixed-race family on a rural council estate in Somerset where he and his three older sisters have three different dads, and his mum is being led into crack addiction by his petty-thief father. He idolises his dad, adores his friend Saffie and the school rabbit Flopsy, and is full of ambition to be the fastest runner in Middledown Primary - like Linford Christie. He and Saffie build a secret world of friendship in the school garden. But Kai's natural optimism, imagination and energy run up against adult behaviour he doesn't understand: his parents' on-and-off romance, his dad's increasing addiction and the limitations of poverty. Despite the people who try to look out for him, notably his loving Nanny Sheila and his big sister Leah, Kai's life drifts towards a tragedy from which it is hard for him to recover. The refuge he seeks in his love of nature, and the wild rabbits who have made their burrows in the woods, may not be refuge enough.Drawing on her own upbringing but turning lived experience into compelling narrative, Karla Neblett has created a vivid language that is both crafted and raw to tell a story of class, race and how our society fails working class young men.
Minarets in the Mountains: A Journey Into Muslim Europe
Tharik Hussain - 2021
Another Europe. A Europe few people believe exists and many wish didn't. Muslim Europe. Writer and documentary-maker Tharik Hussain sets off with his wife and young daughters around the Western Balkans, home to the largest indigenous Muslim population in Europe, and explores the regions of Eastern Europe where Islam has shaped places and people for more than half a millennium. Encountering blonde-haired, blue-eyed Muslims, visiting mystical Islamic lodges clinging to the side of mountains, and praying in mosques older than the Sistine Chapel, he paints a picture of a hidden Muslim Europe, a vibrant place with a breathtaking history, spellbinding culture and unique identity. Minarets in The Mountains, the first non-fiction account by a Muslim writer on this subject, explores the historical roots of the current tide of Islamophobia. Tharik and his family learn lessons about themselves and their own identity as Britons, Europeans, and Muslims. Following in the footsteps of renowned Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi, they remind us that Europe is as Muslim as it is Christian, Jewish or pagan. Like William Dalrymple's In Xanadu, this is a vivid reimagining of a region's cultural heritage, unveiling forgotten Muslim communities, empires and their rulers; and like Kapka Kassabova's Border, it is a quest that forces us to consider what makes up our own identities, and more importantly, who decides?
Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why It's Time to Break the Cycle
Christia Spears Brown - 2021
. . rampant sexual harassment of women and the subsequent #MeToo movement . . . extreme violence toward trans men and women.
It would be easy to fix these problems if the examples stopped with a few racist or sexist individuals, but there are also biases embedded in our government policies, media, and institutions.As a developmental psychologist and international expert on stereotypes and discrimination in children, Dr. Christia Spears Brown knows that biases and prejudice don't just develop as people become adults (or CEOs or politicians). They begin when children are young, slowly growing and exposed to prejudice in their classrooms, after-school activities, and, yes, even in their homes, no matter how enlightened their parents may consider themselves to be. The only way to have a more just and equitable world--not to mention more broad-minded, empathetic children--is for parents to closely examine biases beginning in childhood and how they infiltrate our kids' lives.In her new book Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why It's Time to Break the Cycle, Dr. Brown will uncover what scientists have learned about how children are impacted by biases, and how we adults can help protect them from those biases. Part science, part history, part current events, and part call to arms, Unraveling Bias provides readers with the answers to vital questions:- How do biased policies, schools, and media harm our children? - Where does childhood prejudice come from, and how do these prejudices shape children's behavior, goals, relationships, and beliefs about themselves? - What can we learn from modern-day science to help us protect our children from these biases?Few issues today are as critical as being aware of bias and prejudice all around us and making sure our kids don't succumb to them. To change lives and advance society, it's time to unravel our biases--starting with the future leaders of the world.
The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World
Porter Fox - 2021
In the last fifty years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30%. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.In this deeply researched, beautifully written, and adventure-filled book, journalist Porter Fox travels along the edge of the Northern Hemisphere's snow line to track the scope of this drastic change, and how it will literally change everything—from rapid sea level rise, to fresh water scarcity for two billion people, to massive greenhouse gas emissions from thawing permafrost, and a half dozen climate tipping points that could very well spell the end of our world.This original research is animated by four harrowing and illuminating journeys—each grounded by interviews with idiosyncratic, charismatic experts in their respective fields and Fox's own narrative of growing up on a remote island in Northern Maine.Timely, atmospheric, and expertly investigated, The Last Winter will showcase a shocking and unexpected casualty of climate change—that may well set off its own unstoppable warming cycle.
The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom
Sahar F. Aziz - 2021
Comparing discrimination against immigrant Muslims with the prejudicial treatment of Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and African American Muslims during the twentieth century, Aziz explores the gap between America’s aspiration for and fulfillment of religious freedom. With America’s demographics rapidly changing from a majority white Protestant nation to a multiracial, multireligious society, this book is an in dispensable read for understanding how our past continues to shape our present—to the detriment of our nation’s future.
The Sage Encyclopedia of Trans Studies
Abbie Goldberg - 2021
The experiences and rights of trans people have also increasingly become the subject of news coverage, such as the ability of trans people to access restrooms, their participation in the military, the issuing of driver's licenses that allow a third gender option, the growing visibility of nonbinary trans teens, the denial of gender-affirming health care to trans youth, and the media's misgendering of trans actors. With more and more trans people being open about their gender identities, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, counselors, educators, higher education administrators, student affairs personnel, and others are increasingly working with trans individuals who are out. But many professionals have little formal training or awareness of the life experiences and needs of the trans population. This can seriously interfere with open communications between trans people and service providers and can negatively impact trans people's health outcomes and well-being, as well as interfere with their educational and career success and advancement. Having an authoritative, academic resource like The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies can go a long way toward correcting misconceptions and providing information that is otherwise not readily available. This encyclopedia, featuring more than 300 well-researched articles, takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to trans studies. Entries address a wide range of topics, from broad concepts (e.g., the criminal justice system, activism, mental health), to specific subjects (e.g., the trans pride flag, the Informed Consent Model, voice therapy), to key historical figures, events, and organizations (e.g., Lili Elbe, the Stonewall Riots, Black Lives Matter). Entries focus on diverse lives, identities, and contexts, including the experiences of trans people in different racial, religious, and sexual communities in the United States and the variety of ways that gender is expressed in other countries. Among the fields of studies covered are psychology, sociology, history, family studies, K-12 and higher education, law/political science, medicine, economics, literature, popular culture, the media, and sports.
Green Chili and Other Impostors
Nina Mukerjee Furstenau - 2021
Join M. F. K. Fisher Grand Prize for Excellence in Culinary Writing award-winning author Nina Mukerjee Furstenau as she picks through lost tastes with recipes as codes to everything from political resistance to comfort food and much more. Pinpoint the entry of the Portuguese in India by following green chili trails; find the origins of limes; trace tomatoes and potatoes in India to the Malabar Coast; consider what makes a food, or even a person, foreign and marvel how and when they cease to be. Food history is a world heritage story that has all the drama of a tense thriller or maybe a mystery. Whose food is it? Who gets to tell its tale? Respect for food history might tame the accusations of appropriation, but what is at stake as food traditions and biodiversity ebb away is the great, and not always good, story of us.
