Book picks similar to
Resistance: A Memoir of Civil Disobedience by Annette S. Marquis
social-justice
anti-racism-cultural-comptency
sjdg
social-economic-justice
Before I Forget: How I Survived a Diagnosis of Younger-Onset Dementia at 46
Christine Bryden - 2015
But I can't. It's not in me to walk away from a fight. I'll keep fighting and telling my story. Before I forget.'
When she was just 46, Christine Bryden – a brilliant biochemist, science advisor to the prime minister and single mother of three daughters – was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Doctors told her to get her affairs in order, as she would soon be incapable of doing so. Twenty years later, she is still thriving, still working hard to rewire her brain even as it loses its function. The unusually slow progress of her condition puts Christine in a unique position to describe the lived experience of dementia, a condition that affects 1800 new Australians each week. She shares what it's like to start grasping for words that used to come so easily. To suddenly realise you don't remember how to drive. To be exhausted from the effort of thinking, smiling, talking; of trying to appear 'normal'. In this moving, inspiring memoir, Christine looks back on her life, in an effort to understand how her brain – once her greatest asset, now her greatest challenge – works now. She takes us through being a gifted child and then a troubled adolescent, examines how she survived a destructive marriage while enjoying a high-flying career, and shares the steps she takes to maximise her brain function. This is Christine's legacy for people with dementia and those who care for them.
Bigger Than Us: The Power of Finding Meaning in a Messy World
Fearne Cotton - 2022
Find happiness through purpose. Feel comfort in the universal. Think bigger to unlock you.Writing this book changed my life. I sought the insight and advice of wise minds to explore what they can teach us to achieve happiness, connection and hope. With their help, I peeled back layers of anxiety and self-limiting beliefs to find contentment and deeper meaning. From intuition and energy to manifesting, ritual, prayer, and signs, I have explored positive ideas and simple exercises that are available to every single one of us. Bigger Than Us is for anyone seeking a path through their confusing lives and offers inspiration for tapping into the strength and comfort around us and releasing the blocks and insecurities that hold us back.
Black Tax: Burden or Ubuntu?
Niq Mhlongo - 2019
It delves into the essence of black family life and the secret anguish of family members who often battle to cope.’ – Niq MhlongoA secret torment for some, a proud responsibility for others, ‘black tax’ is a daily reality for thousands of black South Africans. In this thought-provoking and moving anthology, a provocative range of voices share their deeply personal stories.With the majority of black South Africans still living in poverty today, many black middle-class households are connected to working-class or jobless homes. Some believe supporting family members is an undeniable part of African culture and question whether it should even be labelled as a kind of tax.Others point to the financial pressure it places on black students and professionals, who, as a consequence, struggle to build their own wealth. Many feel they are taking over what is essentially a government responsibility.The contributions also investigate the historical roots of black tax, the concept of the black family and the black middle class.In giving voice to so many different perspectives, Black Tax hopes to start a dialogue on this widespread social phenomenon.
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
Kamala Harris - 2019
The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents--an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India--met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. She progressed rapidly to become the elected District Attorney for San Francisco, and then the chief law enforcement officer of the state of California as a whole. Known for bringing a voice to the voiceless, she took on the big banks during the foreclosure crisis, winning a historic settlement for California's working families. Her hallmarks were applying a holistic, data-driven approach to many of California's thorniest issues, always eschewing stale "tough on crime" rhetoric as presenting a series of false choices. Neither "tough" nor "soft" but smart on crime became her mantra. Being smart means learning the truths that can make us better as a community, and supporting those truths with all our might. That has been the pole star that guided Harris to a transformational career as the top law enforcement official in California, and it is guiding her now as a transformational United States Senator, grappling with an array of complex issues that affect her state, our country, and the world, from health care and the new economy to immigration, national security, the opioid crisis, and accelerating inequality.By reckoning with the big challenges we face together, drawing on the hard-won wisdom and insight from her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her, Kamala Harris offers in The Truths We Hold a master class in problem-solving, in crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Through the arc of her own life, on into the great work of our day, she communicates a vision of shared struggle, shared purpose, and shared values. In a book rich in many home truths, not least is that a relatively small number of people work very hard to convince a great many of us that we have less in common than we actually do, but it falls to us to look past them and get on with the good work of living our common truth. When we do, our shared effort will continue to sustain us and this great nation, now and in the years to come.
Separated: Inside An American Tragedy
Jacob Soboroff - 2020
NBC News and MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose the truth of what their lives were like on the inside after seeing them firsthand. His widely shared reports in June 2018 ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the President reversing his own policy by Executive Order, and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.In Separated, Soboroff weaves together his own experience unexpectedly covering this national issue with other key figures in the drama he met along the way, including feuding administration officials responsible for tearing apart and then reuniting families, and the parents and children who were caught in the middle. He reveals new and exclusive details of how the policy was carried out, and how its affects are still being felt. Today, there is still not a full accounting of the total number of children the President ripped away from their parents. The exact number may never be known, only that it is in the thousands. Now the President is doubling down on draconian immigration policies, including threatening to hold migrant families indefinitely and making tens of thousands applying for asylum wait in some of Mexico’s most dangerous cities. Separated is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how Trump and his administration were able to carry out this inhumane policy, and how so many missed what was happening before it was too late. Soboroff lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake in the 2020 presidential election.
Awaken Your Indigo Power: Harness Your Passion, Fulfill Your Purpose, and Activate Your Innate Spiritual Gifts
Doreen Virtue - 2016
Whether you’re an Indigo yourself or a parent or caretaker of one, this book will usher into your life new levels of understanding, peace, and purpose.
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History
Mitch Landrieu - 2018
A passionate, personal, urgent book from the man who sparked a national debate."There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it." When Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of New Orleans in May 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve nationally, and his speech has now been heard or seen by millions across the country. In his first book, Mayor Landrieu discusses his personal journey on race as well as the path he took to making the decision to remove the monuments, tackles the broader history of slavery, race and institutional inequities that still bedevil America, and traces his personal relationship to this history. His father, as state senator and mayor, was a huge force in the integration of New Orleans in the 1960s and 19070s. Landrieu grew up with a progressive education in one of the nation's most racially divided cities, but even he had to relearn Southern history as it really happened.Equal parts unblinking memoir, history, and prescription for finally confronting America's most painful legacy, In the Shadow of Statues will contribute strongly to the national conversation about race in the age of Donald Trump, at a time when racism is resurgent with seemingly tacit approval from the highest levels of government and when too many Americans have a misplaced nostalgia for a time and place that never existed.
I Am the Wolf: Lyrics and Writings
Mark Lanegan - 2017
Lanegan's voice is one of the most distinct and recognizable in rock, but his talents aren't limited to his vocal skills. Lanegan's lyrics are on par with the best of them, exploring with Blake-like insight the stark and scorched emotional terrain that exists somewhere beyond sadness, addiction, trauma, and spiritual longing. With a body of work that now includes seven albums with the Screaming Trees, eleven acclaimed solo albums, three albums of duets with Belle and Sebastian's Isobel Campbell (including the Mercury Prize-shortlisted Ballad of the Broken Seas), and collaborative albums and singles with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Moby, Soulsavers, Twilight Singers, and countless others, Mark Lanegan occupies a singular space in rock music. Now, for the first time ever, the reclusive singer presents a comprehensive look at his lyrics, the stories behind them, and the making of his albums. I Am the Wolf is a rare and candid glimpse into the inner workings and creative process of a legend.
Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr.
Stephen B. Oates - 1982
On April 4th, 1968 a shot rang out in the Memphis sky bringing to a close the life of the last great American hero, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jnr.Although known to most for the delivery of his "I Have a Dream" address, which followed the peaceful march on Washington DC of 250,000 people, and as the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (at age thirty-five), King in his eleven years as elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organisation formed to provide new leadership to the then burgeoning civil rights movement, travelled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action.Let the Trumpet Sound is the detailed examination of this life, written by Stephen B Oates, winner of the Robert E Kennedy Memorial Book Award and the Christopher Award.
Notes on an Exodus
Richard Flanagan - 2016
With illustrations from Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty.In January 2016 Richard Flanagan and Ben Quilty travelled to Lebanon, Greece, and Serbia to follow the river that is the exodus of our age: that of refugees from Syria.Flanagan's 'notes' and Quilty's sketches bear witness to the remarkable people they met on that journey and their stories. These individual portraits from the Man Booker Prize-winning author and Archibald Prize-winning artist combine to form a powerful testament to human dignity and courage in the face of war, death, and suffering.Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and the damned flowing through Europe is my family.
Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption
Jennifer Thompson-Cannino - 2009
She was able to escape, and eventually positively identified Ronald Cotton as her attacker. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken-- but Jennifer's positive identification was the compelling evidence that put him behind bars. After eleven years, Ronald was allowed to take a DNA test that proved his innocence. He was released, after serving more than a decade in prison for a crime he never committed. Two years later, Jennifer and Ronald met face to face-- and forged an unlikely friendship that changed both of their lives.In their own words, Jennifer and Ronald unfold the harrowing details of their tragedy, and challenge our ideas of memory and judgment while demonstrating the profound nature of human grace and the healing power of forgiveness.
The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction
Charles Lane - 2008
But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty African Americans who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga. Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.
Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard
Malcolm X - 1991
These speeches document Malcolm's progression from Black nationalism to internationalism, and are key to both understanding his extraordinary life and illuminating his angry yet uplifting cause.
Get Your Sleep On: A no-nonsense guide for busy moms who want to preserve attachment AND sleep through the night
Christine Lawler - 2017
People talk about it like it’s so easy. But how do you do it in a way that fits your style, protects your relationship with baby and actually works? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you. In this quick and easy guide, I’ll distill all the basics from the best resources out there on baby sleep. I skip the parent shaming and a ton of fluff that the other books are filled with, and I’ll give you the best cliff’s notes version out there so that in an hour or so you can be a sleep-expert, too. I'll explain why sleep is so important, and tell you the biggest secret out there about smooth sleep training (hint: it has nothing to do with how much crying you can tolerate). Parenting isn’t one size fits all, so I give you three solid options that can fit anyone’s paradigm and I'll walk you through a 14-day plan to revolutionize sleep for everyone. What are you waiting for? Let's get your sleep on!
The Blood of Emmett Till
Timothy B. Tyson - 2017
His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, Black students who called themselves “the Emmett Till generation” launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle for civil rights into a mass movement. Till’s lynching became the most notorious hate crime in American history.But what actually happened to Emmett Till—not the icon of injustice, but the flesh-and-blood boy? Part detective story, part political history, drawing on a wealth of new evidence, including a shocking admission of Till’s innocence from the woman in whose name he was killed. this book provides fresh insight into the way race has informed and deformed our democratic institutions.