Best of
Social-Justice

2007

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present


Harriet A. Washington - 2007
    Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others


Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky - 2007
    We may feel tired, cynical, numb, or like we can never do enough. These, and other symptoms, affect us individually and collectively, sapping the energy and effectiveness we so desperately need if we are to benefit humankind, other animals, and the planet itself. Through Trauma Stewardship, we are called to meet these challenges in an intentional way--not by becoming overwhelmed but by developing a quality of mindful presence. Joining the wisdom of ancient cultural traditions with modern psychological research, Lipsky offers a variety of simple and profound practices that will allow us to remake ourselves--and ultimately the world.

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity


Julia Serano - 2007
    Serano shares her experiences and observations—both pre- and post-transition—to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole.Serano's well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this “feminine” weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire.In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex


Incite! Women of Color Against ViolencePaula X. Rojas - 2007
    From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt political movements? Activists--or careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California


Ruth Wilson Gilmore - 2007
    prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade—and How We Can Fight It


David Batstone - 2007
    In this book, David Batstone profiles the new generation of abolitionists who are leading the struggle to end this appalling epidemic.

Four Feet, Two Sandals


Karen Lynn Williams - 2007
    Ten-year-old Lina is thrilled when she finds a sandal that fits her foot perfectly, until she sees that another girl has the matching shoe. But soon Lina and Feroza meet and decide that it is better to share the sandals than for each to wear only one. As the girls go about their routines washing clothes in the river, waiting in long lines for water, and watching for their names to appear on the list to go to America the sandals remind them that frie ndship is what is most important. Four Feet, Two Sandals was inspired by a refugee girl who asked the authors why there were no books about children like her. With warm colors and sensitive brush strokes, this book portrays the strength, courage, and hope of refugees around the world, whose daily existence is marked by uncertainty and fear.

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom


bell hooks - 2007
    The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.

The Enemy: A Book About Peace


Davide Calì - 2007
    What each discovers, as the story unfolds, is that the enemy is not a faceless beast, but rather a real person with family, friends, and dreams.

A Young People's History of the United States, Volume 1: Columbus to the Spanish-American War


Howard Zinn - 2007
    A Young People's History of the United States is also a companion volume to The People Speak, the film adapted from A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.Beginning with a look at Christopher Columbus’s arrival through the eyes of the Arawak Indians, then leading the reader through the struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ending with the current protests against continued American imperialism, Zinn in the volumes of A Young People’s History of the United States presents a radical new way of understanding America’s history. In so doing, he reminds readers that America’s true greatness is shaped by our dissident voices, not our military generals.

No More Goodbyes: Circling the Wagons Around Our Gay Loved Ones


Carol Lynn Pearson - 2007
    In "No More Goodbyes," Pearson revisits the challenging subject of religious people relating to their gay loved ones who are often condemned by their church and--many believe--by God. Through stories gathered from the microcosm of Mormonism, it becomes clear how this emotional earthquake affects families of all faiths.

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America


Elliot Jaspin - 2007
    The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation. We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansingabove and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and drove thousands from their homes, sweeping entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." The expulsions were swift-in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day. Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it.

Street Dogs


Traer Scott - 2007
    There are also mini-biographies of many of the dogs, with details of their rescue amd journey to new homes.

Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God


Elizabeth A. Johnson - 2007
    On different continents, under pressure from historical events and social conditions, people of faith have glimpsed the living God in fresh ways. It is not that a wholly different God is discovered from the One believed in by previous generations. Christian faith does not believe in a new God but, finding itself in new situations, seeks the presence of God there. Aspects long-forgotten are brought into new relationships with current events, and the depths of divine compassion are appreciated in ways not previously imagined.' This book sets out the fruit of these discoveries. The first chapter describes Johnson's point of departure and the rules of engagement, with each succeeding chapter distilling a discrete idea of God. Featured are transcendental, political, liberation, feminist, black, Hispanic, interreligious, and ecological theologies, ending with the particular Christian idea of the one God as Trinity.

Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing


Miranda Fricker - 2007
    Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Dream: The Words And Inspiration Of Martin Luther King, Jr.


Martin Luther King Jr. - 2007
    Peace, Dream, and Love feature an introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism


Joyce Green - 2007
    Yet there is also an articulate, theoretically informed and activist constituency that identifies as feminist.This book is by and about Indigenous feminists, whose work demonstrates a powerful and original intellectual and political contribution demonstrating that feminism has much to offer Indigenous women in their struggles against oppression and for equality. Indigenous feminism is international in its scope: the contributors here are from Canada, the USA, Sapmi (Samiland), and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The chapters include theoretical contributions, stories of political activism, and deeply personal accounts of developing political consciousness as Aboriginal feminists.

Chicago's Nelson Algren


Arthur Shay - 2007
    Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn’t pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay’s camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren’s poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools.Chicago’s Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you’ll see Shay’s pictures; look at Shay’s photos and you’ll hear Nelson’s words.

NOT A BOOK


NOT A BOOK - 2007
    A powerful visual tool building on Joanna Macy’s book Coming Back to Life, this valuable resource is a light in the political darkness of our time. The lively, personal presentation of Joanna’s work will appeal to workshop facilitators and participants alike, as well as anyone with an interest in personal transformation.Joanna Macy is an eco-philosopher, scholar, teacher, activist, and the author of seven previous books.

Transformation: Change the Marketplace and Change the World


Ed Silvoso - 2007
    Mingling contemporary stories and biblical anecdotes with practical advice, Silvoso shows how God intervenes in human affairs today to transform people and nations. He also shares five critical paradigms for transformation that are pivotal for change: Discipling Nations, Reclaiming the Marketplace, Looking at Work as Worship, Becoming Salt and Light, and Eliminating Poverty. In these pages, readers will find extraordinary stories about the power of God working through those who discovered their specific purpose. Then, they’ll be challenged to transform themselves and, by doing so, transform their families, schools, businesses and nations. Silvoso encourages readers to aim high, knowing that God has entrusted them with great things. “God sees you as a nation transformer,” says Silvoso. He has faith in you!

Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System


Douglas S. Massey - 2007
    While other developed countries face similar challenges from globalization and technological change, none rivals America’s singularly poor record for equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of recent economic shifts. In Categorically Unequal, Douglas Massey weaves together history, political economy, and even neuropsychology to provide a comprehensive explanation of how America’s culture and political system perpetuates inequalities between different segments of the population.Categorically Unequal is striking both for its theoretical originality and for the breadth of topics it covers. Massey argues that social inequalities arise from the universal human tendency to place others into social categories. In America, ethnic minorities, women, and the poor have consistently been the targets of stereotyping, and as a result, they have been exploited and discriminated against throughout the nation’s history. African-Americans continue to face discrimination in markets for jobs, housing, and credit. Meanwhile, the militarization of the US-Mexican border has discouraged Mexican migrants from leaving the United States, creating a pool of exploitable workers who lack the legal rights of citizens. Massey also shows that women’s advances in the labor market have been concentrated among the affluent and well-educated, while low-skilled female workers have been relegated to occupations that offer few chances for earnings mobility. At the same time, as the wages of low-income men have fallen, more working-class women are remaining unmarried and raising children on their own. Even as minorities and women continue to face these obstacles, the progressive legacy of the New Deal has come under frontal assault. The government has passed anti-union legislation, made taxes more regressive, allowed the real value of the federal minimum wage to decline, and drastically cut social welfare spending. As a result, the income gap between the richest and poorest has dramatically widened since 1980. Massey attributes these anti-poor policies in part to the increasing segregation of neighborhoods by income, which has insulated the affluent from the social consequences of poverty, and to the disenfranchisement of the poor, as the population of immigrants, prisoners, and ex-felons swells.America’s unrivaled disparities are not simply the inevitable result of globalization and technological change. As Massey shows, privileged groups have systematically exploited and excluded many of their fellow Americans. By delving into the root causes of inequality in America, Categorically Unequal provides a compelling argument for the creation of a more equitable society. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series

Reproduce and Revolt


Josh MacPhee - 2007
    Both a striking collection of images and a graphic toolbox for political activists, the book contains over 300 high-quality illustrations and graphics covering issues such as war, the environment, immigration, the media, feminism, queer liberation, antiauthoritarianism, and police brutality. Clear instructions help readers use the images to achieve maximum impact.

Other: an Asian & Pacific Islander Prisoners' Anthology


Eddy Zheng - 2007
    Through original poetry, vignettes, essays, first-hand narratives, interviews, and drawings, 22 contributors cover topics such as the factors that led to their incarceration, the cruelty that occurs in prisons and immigration detention j ails, and the harsh reality of deportation that awaits many API prisoners. By offering readers a glimpse into their innermost fears, regrets, and dreams, these prisoners contribute an important voice to our societyas discussion around race, immigration, and prison issues.

Creating Critical Classrooms: K-8 Reading and Writing with an Edge


Mitzi A. Lewison - 2007
    Critical literacy practices encourage students to use language to question the everyday world, interrogate the relationship between language and power, analyze popular culture and media, understand how power relationships are socially constructed, and consider actions that can be taken to promote social justice. By providing both a model for critical literacy instruction and many examples of how critical practices can be enacted in daily school life in elementary and middle school classrooms, Creating Critical Classrooms meets a huge need for a practical, theoretically based text on this topic.

Maternal Theory Essential Readings


Andrea O'Reilly - 2007
    This collection, the first ever anthology on maternal theory, introduces readers to this rich and diverse tradition of maternal theory. Composed of 50 chapters and covering more than three decades of scholarship, Maternal Theory includes all the “must read” theorists on motherhood. Writers include: Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Sara Ruddick, Alice Walker, Barbara Katz Rothman, bell hooks, Sharon Hays, Patricia Hill-Collins, Julia Kristeva, Kim Anderson, Audre Lorde, Ellen Lewin, Daphne de Marneffe, Ariel Gore, Ann Crittenden, Judith Warner and many more. Maternal Theory is essential reading for anyone interested in motherhood as experience, ideology, and identity.

A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer: Writings to Stop Violence Against Women and Girls


Eve Ensler - 2007
    These diverse voices rise up in a collective roar to break open, expose, and examine the insidiousness of brutality, neglect, a punch, or a put-down. Here is Edward Albee on S&M; Maya Angelou on women’s work; Michael Cunningham on self-mutilation; Dave Eggers on a Sudanese abduction; Carol Gilligan on a daughter witnessing her mother being hit; Susan Miller on raising a son as a single mother; and Sharon Olds on a bra.These writings are inspired, funny, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and beautiful. But above all, together they create a true and profound portrait of this issue’s effect on every one of us. With information on how to organize an “Until the Violence Stops” event in your community, A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer is a call to the world to demand an end to violence against women.“In the current era, it takes some brain racking to think of anyone else doing anything quite like Ensler. She’s a countercultural consciousness-raiser, an empowering figure, a truth-teller.”–Chicago Tribune

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson


Susan Burch - 2007
    He had never been declared insane by a medical professional or found guilty of any criminal charge. But he was deaf and black in the Jim Crow South. Unspeakable is the story of his life.Using legal records, institutional files, and extensive oral history interviews--some conducted in sign language--Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner piece together the story of a deaf man accused in 1925 of attempted rape, found insane at a lunacy hearing, committed to the criminal ward of the State Hospital for the Colored Insane, castrated, forced to labor for the institution, and held at the hospital for more than seven decades. Junius Wilson's life was shaped by some of the major developments of twentieth-century America: Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, deinstitutionalization, the rise of professional social work, and the emergence of the deaf and disability rights movements. In addition to offering a bottom-up history of life in a segregated mental institution, Burch and Joyner's work also enriches the traditional interpretation of Jim Crow by highlighting the complicated intersections of race and disability as well as of community and language. This moving study expands the boundaries of what biography can and should be. There is much to learn and remember about Junius Wilson--and the countless others who have lived unspeakable histories.

The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings, 2001-2006


Subcomandante Marcos - 2007
    From a retelling of indigenous myths and legends, to visions of the future of Mexico, from searing critiques of the US war in Iraq, to clandestine radio broadcasts from the jungles of Chiapas, here is an amazing selection of writing that gives voice to the literary and poetic genius of Latin America’s greatest living writer and rebel.

Disappearing Daughters: The Tragedy of Female Foeticide


Gita Aravamudan - 2007
    (Kanchamma, a midwife from Alligundam village in Tamil Nadu). We knew the doctor at the scan centre and...went to the clinic that he suggested and had the foetus removed. The next two times were also okay except that I got very tired and had to give up my job. My husband said having a son was more important than having a job. (Renu, from Chandigarh, who has had four abortions in five years). India has historically had a deficit of women compared to most other countries, but we now live in a time when a systematic extermination of an entire gender is taking place right before our eyes. Until the 1980s, women and girls were dying either of neglect or were killed soon after they were born. Today, the horrifying reality is that, thanks to advances in medical technology, they are now eliminated while still in the womb. Female foeticide has become an organized crime and the ultrasound machine has mutated into an instrument of murder. In Disappearing Daughters, Gita Aravamudan uses the tools of investigative reporting to expose the imperatives that drive this horrific phenomenon. She unravels an appalling story of deeply embedded and destructive patriarchal beliefs, disempowered women who have no claim on their own bodies and the active complicity of a ruthless and callous medical and social system. This book makes it chillingly clear that the macabre practice of eliminating female foetuses spells doom for our sons as well as our daughters and is bound to have a disastrous impact on future generations.

All Our Sisters: Stories of Homeless Women in Canada


Susan Scott - 2007
    They are our mothers, our daughters, our aunts, our nieces, our wives?they are all our sisters?and they remain largely invisible compared to homeless men.Susan Scott interviewed more than 60 women facing homelessness across Canada. Part of her agreement with these women was to tell their stories in the way they would want to have them told. With uncompromising honesty and a deep sense of empathy, Scott recounts their stories while highlighting the many underlying problems they face. These include personal histories of abuse, addiction, and violence, as well as systemic conditions of gentrification, a paucity of affordable housing, and a lack of social services sensitive to women's needs."All Our Sisters "is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the conditions facing homeless women in Canada.

Practicing Peace


Catherine Whitmire - 2007
    Query questions lead readers on a journey to self-discovery and through the stages of practicing peace: first by focusing inwardly, then turning our eyes to practice peace in the world around us. This resources serves as a devotional guide to the Quaker discipline of practicing peace for spiritual seekers of any religious tradition.

Scars Tell Stories: A Queer and Trans (Dis)ability Zine


Colin Kennedy Donovan - 2007
    Through poetry, art, and essays, this zine tells our stories—funny, sexy, and complex—as a radical act of resistance, and prioritizes the work of trans people and people of color working for radical social change.Featuring artwork, poetry, and essays by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Sarain Cuthand, Louis Esmé Cruz, Sharon Deevey, Loree Erickson, romham padraig gallacher, Raven Gildea, emi k, Dani Frances Montgomery, Peggy Munson , billie rain, Tsi-ge'-yu Sharp, Captain Snowden, suki valentine, and Sharon Wachsler.

Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in Your Community


Joan Minieri - 2007
    Authors Joan Minieri and Paul Getsos share stories and tools from their nationally recognized and award-winning work of building a community-led organization, training community leaders, and conducting campaigns that changed public policy and delivered concrete results to tens of thousands of people. This how-to manual includes:- In-depth analysis of how to launch and win a campaign- Tools and guidelines for training people to lead their own campaigns and organizations- Insights for using technology effectively, building more powerful alliances, and engaging in the social justice movement

Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality


Wendy Leo Moore - 2007
    Reproducing Racism is an examination of white privilege and power in two elite United States law schools. Moore examines how racial structures, racialized everyday practices, and racial discourses function in law schools. Utilizing an ethnographic lens, Moore explores the historical construction of elite law schools as institutions that reinforce white privilege and therefore naturalize white political, social, and economic power.

The Collected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett: The Complete Works PergamonMedia (Highlights of World Literature)


Ida B. Wells-Barnett - 2007
    Wells-Barnett• The Red Record by Ida B. Wells-Barnett• Mob Rule in New Orleans by Ida B. Wells-Barnett• HON. FRED. DOUGLASS'S LETTER• THE OFFENSE• THE BLACK AND WHITE OF IT• THE NEW CRY• THE MALICIOUS AND UNTRUTHFUL WHITE PRESS• THE SOUTH'S POSITION• SELF-HELP• etc.

Love at Gunpoint


nila northSun - 2007
    Her poems are a confession of the extremes of her life: the highs of a first kiss, the lows of coming home to an empty house. "nila northSun's new poems are funny and brutal. In short, direct lines, she tells the story of a life filled with pain, shame, agony, and glorious little moments of joy. She is one of my favorite poets"-Sherman Alexie. Her book A SNAKE IN THE MOUTH is also available from SPD.

Lily and the Paper Man


Rebecca Upjohn - 2007
    Frightened, Lily insists on taking the bus home every day for fear she will run into him again. But when the weather turns cold, Lily starts to see the Paper Man differently; she sees his bare toes through the holes in his boots and his thin shirt through the holes in his coat. As she lies in her warm bed at night, she wonders about the Paper Man and how he stays warm. Lily comes up with an idea and overcomes her fear.

Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Sergeant Camilo Mejia


Camilo Mejia - 2007
    Here, he tells his own story, from his upbringing in Central America and his experience as a working-class immigrant in the United States, to his service in Iraq and as a prisoner guard.

The God of Intimacy and Action: Reconnecting Ancient Spiritual Practices, Evangelism, and Justice


Tony Campolo - 2007
    The result is a dynamite book that many have been waiting a long time for." --Relevant Magazine"In 25 years, when we look back as journalists chronicling this era of religious reawakening--this book likely will turn up as a classic....This book is both a manifesto--and a sturdy guidebook--for the journey of reclaiming much that has been lost." --David Crumm, founder of Read the Spirit"Tony Campolo and Mary Darling...are two first rate minds grappling with classical and contemporary theology, and then adding to that a set of concrete practices...The Network of Spiritual Progressives (including those of us who are not Christian) can draw much wisdom and guidance from this book." --Tikkun Magazine"I know both Tony and Mary personally and can testify to the genuineness of their search for spiritual wholeness. It is a search that always holds in creative tension a profound intimacy with God through Christ with a vigorous engagement in the social realities of our day." --Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline"Darling and Campolo sift through the dirt of Christendom and uncover the precious treasures of our faith." --Shane Claiborne, founding member of The Simple Way community; author of The Irresistible Revolution; and recovering sinner

Racism: A Beginner's Guide


Alana Lentin - 2007
    Alana Lentin traces its development through political history right up to modern debates about ethnicity and xenophobia, and considers the implications of a ‘raceless’ and truly multicultural society. Thought-provoking and intelligent, this invaluable resource exposes the earliest roots of racist thought, and reveals how it has tenaciously remained a part of our everyday lives.

Parkinson's Disease For Dummies


Michele Tagliati - 2007
    It’s brighter than you think. In Parkinson’s Disease for Dummies, you’ll discover how to keep a positive attitude and lead an active, productive life as this user-friendly, guide pilots you through the important steps toward taking charge of your condition. It helps you: Make sure you have an accurate diagnosis Assemble and work with your health care team Inform others about your condition Choose the most effective medications Establish a diet and exercise regimen Consider surgical options, alternative therapies, and clinical trials Maintain healthy personal and professional relationships Adjust your routine as your PD progresses This one-stop resource provides proven coping skills, first-hand advice, and practical tools, such as worksheets to assess care options, questions to ask doctors, and current listings of care providers.

Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development


Miriam Jorgensen - 2007
    It is a quiet revolution, largely unnoticed in society at large. But it is profoundly important. From the High Plains states and Prairie Provinces to the southwestern deserts, from Mississippi and Oklahoma to the northwest coast of the continent, Native peoples are reclaiming their right to govern themselves and to shape their future in their own ways. Challenging more than a century of colonial controls, they are addressing severe social problems, building sustainable economies, and reinvigorating Indigenous cultures. In effect, they are rebuilding their nations according to their own diverse and often innovative designs. Produced by the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy at the University of Arizona and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, this book traces the contours of that revolution as Native nations turn the dream of self-determination into a practical reality. Part report, part analysis, part how-to manual for Native leaders, it discusses strategies for governance and community and economic development being employed by American Indian nations and First Nations in Canada as they move to assert greater control over their own affairs.Rebuilding Native Nations provides guidelines for creating new governance structures, rewriting constitutions, building justice systems, launching nation-owned enterprises, encouraging citizen entrepreneurs, developing new relationships with non-Native governments, and confronting the crippling legacies of colonialism. For nations that wish to join that revolution or for those who simply want to understand the transformation now underway across Indigenous North America, this book is a critical resource.CONTENTS Foreword by Oren Lyons Editor's Introduction Part 1 Starting Points 1. Two Approaches to the Development of Native Nations: One Works, the Other Doesn't Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt 2. Development, Governance, Culture: What Are They and What Do They Have to Do with Rebuilding Native Nations? Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Joseph P. Kalt Part 2 Rebuilding the Foundations 3. Remaking the Tools of Governance: Colonial Legacies, Indigenous Solutions Stephen Cornell 4. The Role of Constitutions in Native Nation Building: Laying a Firm Foundation Joseph P. Kalt 5 . Native Nation Courts: Key Players in Nation Rebuilding Joseph Thomas Flies-Away, Carrie Garrow, and Miriam Jorgensen 6. Getting Things Done for the Nation: The Challenge of Tribal Administration Stephen Cornell and Miriam Jorgensen Part 3 Reconceiving Key Functions 7. Managing the Boundary between Business and Politics: Strategies for Improving the Chances for Success in Tribally Owned Enterprises Kenneth Grant and Jonathan Taylor 8. Citizen Entrepreneurship: An Underutilized Development Resource Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Ian Wilson Record, and Joan Timeche 9. Governmental Services and Programs: Meeting Citizens' Needs Alyce S. Adams, Andrew J. Lee, and Michael Lipsky 10. Intergovernmental Relationships: Expressions of Tribal Sovereignty Sarah L. Hicks Part 4 Making It Happen 11. Rebuilding Native Nations: What Do Leaders Do? Manley A. Begay, Jr., Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, and Nathan Pryor 12. Seizing the Future: Why Some Native Nations Do and Others Don't Stephen Cornell, Miriam Jorgensen, Joseph P. Kalt, and Katherine Spilde Contreras Afterword by Satsan (Herb George) References About the Contributors Index

The Wages of Whiteness


David R. Roediger - 2007
    

The Crisis of Imprisonment


Rebecca McLennan - 2007
    Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free republic: it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal servitude: --how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent today: What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others--is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.

Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ


Bradley Jersak - 2007
    BakerSharon BakerAnthony BartlettMarcus BorgRonald S. DartE. Robert EkbladMichael HardinBrad JersakAndrew P. KlagerBrita MikoC. F. D. MouleWayne NortheyNathan RiegerRichard RohrMiroslav VolfJ. Denny WeaverRowan WilliamsN. T. Wright

Race, Law, and American Society: 1607-Present


Gloria J. Browne-Marshall - 2007
    Throughout, she places advocates for freedom and equality at the center, moving from their struggle for physical freedom in the slavery era to more recent battles for equal rights and economic equality. From the colonial period to the present, this book examines education, property ownership, voting rights, criminal justice, and the military as well as internationalism and civil liberties. Race, Law, and American Society is highly accessible and thorough in its depiction of the role race has played, with the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court, in shaping virtually every major American social institution.

Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage


Leslie Houts Picca - 2007
    While there are many books that deal with public attitudes, behaviours, and incidences concerning race and racism (frontstage), there are few studies on the attitudes whites display among friends, family, and other whites in private settings (backstage). The core of this book draws upon 626 journals of racial events kept by white college students at twenty-eight colleges in the United States. The book seeks to comprehend how whites think in racial terms by analyzing their reported racial events.

Honor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America's Military


Mic Hunter - 2007
    Presenting first-person accounts, the author of Hope and Recovery probes beyond the headlines to reveal the reality of sexual abuse in the military.

Search and Rescue Dogs


Marie-Therese Miller - 2007
    This book contains tales including that of a disaster search and rescue dog that leaps from metal beam to concrete slab while trying to locate an earthquake victim trapped beneath the rubble of a fallen building.

The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History


Andrew G. Bostom - 2007
    Debunking the conventional wisdom, which continues to assert that Muslim animosity toward Jews is entirely a 20th-century phenomenon fueled mainly by the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, leading scholars provide example after example of antisemitic motifs in Muslim documents reaching back to the beginnings of Islam. The contributors show that the Koran itself is a significant source of hostility toward Jews, as well as other foundational Muslim texts including the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters) and the sira (the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad). Many other examples are adduced in the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English - such as Hartwig Hirschfeld's mid-1880s essays on Muhammad's subjugation of the Jews of Medina and George Vajda's elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith - detail the sacralized rationale for Islam's anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today.

Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality


Kasey S. Pipes - 2007
    When Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to integrate Central High School in September 1957, he couldn't know that he was fighting the last great battle of his career...one that would change forever both him and his country. This is the story of how one of America's greatest leaders confronted America's greatest sin. This is the unlikely tale of how Ike became a civil rights president.Ike represents is a revolution in scholarship on Eisenhower and civil rights. Though not uncritical, the book credits his steady personal advance on the issue as well as his accomplishments in the military and as president. Drawing on thousands of primary documents (including newly released material), Ike's Last Battle builds to its climax at Little Rock-one of the most pivotal events of the civil rights movement. Little Rock is at the epicenter, but the book will also look at the cause, and the aftermath.

Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship


Charles R. Hale - 2007
    Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. What ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work? In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists map the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet.Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas

Mutha Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture


L.H. Stallings - 2007
     L. H. Stallings offers distinct close readings of understudied African American women’s texts through a critical engagement with folklore and queer theory. To date, most studies on the trickster figure have rarely reflected the boldness and daring of the figure itself. Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis. Mutha’ is Half a Word strives to break that convention. This book provides a much-needed analysis of trickster tradition in regard to gender, sexuality, and Black female sexual desire. It is the only study to focus specifically on trickster figures and African American female culture. In addition, it contributes to conversations regarding the cultural representation of Black female desire in ways that are not strategically invested in heteronormative binaries of male/female and heterosexual/homosexual. The study is distinctly different because it explores folklore, vernacular, and trickster strategies of queerness alongside theories of queer studies to create new readings of desire in literary texts, hip-hop and neo-soul music, and comedic performances by Black females.

Disadvantage


Jonathan Wolff - 2007
    Part 1 presents a pluralist analysis of disadvantage, modifying the capability theory of Sen and Nussbaum to produce the 'genuine opportunity for secure functioning' view. This emphasizes risk and insecurity as a central component of disadvantage. Part 2 shows how to identify the least advantaged in society even on a pluralist view. The authors suggest that disadvantage 'clusters' in the sense that some people are disadvantaged in several different respects. Thus identifying the least advantaged is not as problematic as it appears to be. Conversely, a society which has 'declustered disadvantaged'--in the sense that no group lacks secure functioning on a range of functionings--has made considerable progress in the direction of equality. Part 3 explores how to decluster disadvantage, by paying special attention to 'corrosive disadvantages'--those disadvantages which cause further disadvantages--and 'fertile functionings'--those which are likely to secure other functionings.In sum this books presents a refreshing new analysis of disadvantage, and puts forward proposals to help governments improve the lives of the least advantaged in their societies, thereby moving in the direction of equality.

Mandate to Difference: An Invitation to the Contemporary Church


Walter Brueggemann - 2007
    Based on speaking engagements surrounding his critical passion and conviction that the church in this moment must set itself in tension with the rest of the world, these essays call the church to courageously defy political polarization, consumerism, and militarism.

On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century


Sherrilyn A. Ifill - 2007
    While the lynchings were devastating, the little-known contemporary consequences, such as the marginalization of political and economic development for blacks, are equally pernicious. Ifill traces the lingering effects of two lynchings in Maryland to illustrate how ubiquitous this history is, and she issues a clarion call for the many American communities with histories of racial violence to be proactive in facing this legacy. Ifill provides concrete ideas for communities. On the Courthouse Lawn is a much-needed roadmap to help communities finally confront lynching's long shadow by embracing pragmatic reconciliation and reparation efforts.