Book picks similar to
Revolutionary Notes by Julius Lester
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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer - 2013
As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
A Never Event
Evelyn V. McKnight - 2008
But the fanfare soon turned into a nightmare. During chemotherapy treatments, 857 patients who were already waging the fights of their lives against cancer were inexplicably exposed to the deadly, blood-borne hepatitis C virus. At least ninety-nine of them contracted the lethal illness. The horror was unprecedented as this was the largest healthcare-transmitted outbreak of hepatitis C in American history, and remains so to this date. A Never Event - a term used to describe a preventable medical tragedy - is a searing account of the health challenges these patients encountered and their quest for justice, as well as the painstaking investigation to uncover the source of the outbreak. It s a story of recklessness, deception and betrayal by the person these patients should have been able to trust the most: their physician, a man who, when the outbreak was discovered, fled the US for his native country in the Middle East. Written by a survivor of the tragedy and an attorney who represented many of the victims, A Never Event is a wake-up call to medical and legal communities nationwide.
Just Us: An American Conversation
Claudia Rankine - 2020
Rankine's questions disrupt 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 live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America
Nikesh Shukla - 2019
In this much-anticipated follow-up to the bestselling UK edition, hailed by Zadie Smith as "lively and vital," editors Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman hand the microphone to an incredible range of writers whose humanity and right to be here is under attack. Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria.Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in.Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir.Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage.These writers, and the many others in this singular collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, troubling and uplifting, the essays in The Good Immigrant come together to create a provocative, conversation-sparking, multivocal portrait of America now.
We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
Nesrine Malik - 2019
Six myths have taken hold, ones which are at odds with our lived experience and in urgent need of revision.Has freedom of speech become a cover for promoting prejudice? Has the concept of political correctness been weaponised to avoid ceding space to those excluded from power? Does white identity politics pose an urgent danger? These are some of the questions at the centre of Nesrine Malik's radical and compelling analysis that challenges us to find new narrators whose stories can fill the void and unite us behind a shared vision.
And Life Continues: Sex Trafficking and My Journey To Freedom
Wendy Barnes - 2015
And Life Continues is her story: how she became a victim of human trafficking, why she was unable to leave the man who enslaved her for fifteen years, and the obstacles she overcame to heal and rebuild her life after she was rescued.
The Life and Prayers of Mother Teresa
Wyatt North - 2013
Mother Teresa wanted to do “something beautiful for God.” At the time of her death in 1997, there were nearly 4,000 Missionaries of Charity Sisters established in 610 houses in 123 countries. The congregation did not cease growing with her death. Today, there are more than 5,000 Sisters. The work continues to thrive as the network of Missionaries of Charity continues to operate centers in countries throughout the world. In 1985, Mother Teresa was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly. On that occasion, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, called her “the most powerful woman in the world.” At the end of 1999, two years after Mother Teresa’s death, Gallup published a poll of America’s most widely admired people of the 20th century. Mother Teresa topped the list, ahead of such luminaries as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein.
The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior
Sarah Kendzior - 2015
Louis journalist Sarah Kendzior tackles issues including labor exploitation, racism, gentrification, media bias and other aspects of the post-employment economy. Sample titles: "The Peril of Hipster Economics", "The Wrong Kind of Caucasian", "Survival is Not an Aspiration". "Mothers Are Not 'Opting Out' -- They Are Out of Options", "Academia's Indentured Servants", "Meritocracy for Sale", "The Immorality of College Admissions", "Expensive Cities Are Killing Creativity". A former columnist for Al Jazeera English, Kendzior has spent years chronicling an America of diminishing opportunities. This collection contains the best of her work.
The Browns Blues: Two Decades of Utter Frustration: Why Everything Kept Going Wrong for the Cleveland Browns
Terry Pluto - 2018
And their fans had ulcers. Now, veteran sports columnist Terry Pluto explains why everything kept going wrong. This detailed report on two decades of disappointment takes a behind-the-scenes look at upheaval in the front office, frustration on the field, and headaches and heartache in the stands. His earlier book False Start: How the New Browns Were Set Up to Fail told how the NFL hamstrung the new franchise. Who could have predicted the limping would last 19 years? This book picks up the story. Season after season began with hope in spring for the NFL draft (“the Browns’ version of the Super Bowl,” a fan called it) . . . often a new coach or GM or quarterback (or all three) . . . then the losses . . . and back to rebuilding. Pluto reviews all the major moves—draft choices and deals, hiring and firing and reshuffling—and the results. If you’re a Browns fan who wants to understand what went wrong with your team, this is the place to start. Includes heartfelt and humorous opinions contributed by fans.
Global Village Idiot: Dubya, Dunces, and One Last Word Before You Vote
John O'Farrell - 2001
“Just when we thought the lawlessness in Iraq was over,” O’Farrell observes, “even more blatant incidents of looting have begun. With handkerchiefs masking their faces, two rioters roughly the height of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld kicked in the gates of the largest oilfield and grabbed the keys of the gasoline trucks. ‘Yee-haw! It’s all ours! Millions of barrels of the stuff’ they laughed. ‘Yup!’ added the leader ‘ and this mask guarantees my anonymousinity!’ So after all these years there really is such a person as the Thief of Baghdad. Except strangely his accent sounded vaguely Texan.”A writer for the groundbreaking television show Spitting Image and contributor to the screenplay for the hit movie Chicken Run, O’Farrell meticulously researched his conclusions “by spending five minutes on the internet and then giving up.” And while O’Farrell’s sharpest barbs and stingers have often been written to come out of the mouths of grotesque puppets and Claymation chickens, this time around he keeps the best lines for himself: ‘‘With the election of the 43rd President of the United States, the global village is complete,” O’Farrell writes. “’It has its own global village idiot.’”
Stella's Secret: A True Story of Holocaust Survival
Jerry L. Jennings - 2005
But it is Stella’s voice, the amazing way that she tells her story, that makes this Holocaust story so unique, powerful and endearing. The reader listens to Stella’s stunning simplicity of expression, her use of Polish and Yiddish phrases, her humor, her all-so-frequent grammatical errors – and is charmed. It is a story that only Stella Yollin can tell, and it can only be told in Stella’s sweet and incomparable way.
Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
Ed Morales - 2019
The devastation that ensued finally grew impossible to ignore in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane María, as the physical destruction compounded the infrastructure collapse and trauma inflicted by the debt crisis. In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.Taking readers from San Juan to New York City and back to his family's home in the Luquillo Mountains, Morales shows us the machinations of financial and political interests in both the US and Puerto Rico, and the resistance efforts of Puerto Rican artists and activists. Through it all, he emphasizes that the only way to stop Puerto Rico from being bled is to let Puerto Ricans take control of their own destiny, going beyond the statehood-commonwealth-independence debate to complete decolonization.
Alligator Blood: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the High-rolling Whiz-kid who Controlled Online Poker's Billions
James Leighton - 2013
That is until he discovered the lucrative world of payment processing for online poker companies. Soon the Australian whiz-kid was living the American dream, raking in as much as $3m a week. Revelling in his jet set lifestyle of fast cars, luxury yachts and VIP nightclubs, he embarked on an epic rollercoaster of champagne fuelled excess which mirrored that of the extraordinary world of online poker, where hot shot college students won millions from the confines of their dorms, and fortunes were won or lost in seconds.However, Tzvetkoff’s move to the neon splattered underworld of Las Vegas would soon see him facing the abyss. Owing millions to the poker companies, and with the FBI hot on his trail, the tarnished boy wonder needed to pull an ace from his sleeve to keep from busting out. And when he did, it resulted in a day that sent a seismic shockwave through the world of online poker and saw him take the blame.
She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs
Sarah Smarsh - 2020
Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, “country music was foremost a language among women. It’s how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren’t discussed.” And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton. Smarsh challenged a typically male vision of the rural working class with her first book, Heartland, starring the bold, hard-luck women who raised her. Now, in She Come By It Natural, originally published in a four-part series for The Journal of Roots Music, No Depression, Smarsh explores the overlooked contributions to social progress by such women—including those averse to the term “feminism”—as exemplified by Dolly Parton’s life and art. Far beyond the recently resurrected “Jolene” or quintessential “9 to 5,” Parton’s songs for decades have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as “trailer trash.” Parton’s broader career—from singing on the front porch of her family’s cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from “girl singer” managed by powerful men to leader of a self-made business and philanthropy empire—offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture. Infused with Smarsh’s trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, She Come By It Natural is a sympathetic tribute to the icon Dolly Parton and—call it whatever you like—the organic feminism she embodies.
Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights
Helen Lewis - 2020
Feminism’s success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperfect women, who fought each other as well as fighting for equal rights. Helen Lewis argues that too many of these pioneers have been whitewashed or forgotten in our modern search for feel-good, inspirational heroines. It’s time to reclaim the history of feminism as a history of difficult women.In this book, you’ll meet the working-class suffragettes who advocated bombings and arson; the princess who discovered why so many women were having bad sex; the pioneer of the refuge movement who became a men’s rights activist; the ‘striker in a sari’ who terrified Margaret Thatcher; the wronged Victorian wife who definitely wasn’t sleeping with the prime minister; and the lesbian politician who outraged the country. Taking the story up to the present with the twenty-first-century campaign for abortion services, Helen Lewis reveals the unvarnished – and unfinished – history of women’s rights.Drawing on archival research and interviews, Difficult Women is a funny, fearless and sometimes shocking narrative history, which shows why the feminist movement has succeeded – and what it should do next. The battle is difficult, and we must be difficult too.