Book picks similar to
Resistance: A Memoir of Civil Disobedience by Annette S. Marquis
social-justice
history-biography-politics-econ
non-fiction-memoir
sjdg
Welcome: A Unitarian Universalist Primer
Patricia Frevert - 2008
Plus introductions to UU history, religious education and social justice.Praise for Welcome: A Unitarian Universalist Primer:"A thoughtful and spirit-filled introduction to our liberating and nourishing faith." Rob M. Hardies, senior minister, All Souls Church, Unitarian, Washington, DC“This Primer is precisely what a newcomer needs: a brief, lucid history; commonly used readings and prayers; and inspirational quotations that indicate something of our theological diversity and devotion to justice.” Marilyn Sewell, senior minister, First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon
Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan
Todd Tucker - 2004
To that conflict he traces the decline of the Klan in Indiana and the acceptance of the university and Catholics more generally in the US. Annotation 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews
Pro Bono The 18year defense of Caril Ann Fugate
Jeff McArthur - 2012
With him when he was captured was his 14-year-old ex-girlfriend Caril Fugate. The question soon arose, was Caril a kidnapped victim, or a heartless accomplice?Appointed to her case, attorney John McArthur initially accepted the assignment out of a sense of constitutional duty. But as he delved deeper, he found that the truth was far more complicated than anyone was letting on. Up against incredible odds, and with a strong conviction of her innocence, McArthur remained with Caril and fought for her freedom for 18 years. For this service, he took no pay, accepting the case pro bono.This book follows the long struggle of McArthur, his partner Merril Reller, and John's son James as they took on the Nebraska legal system and a public that had already determined Caril's guilt before ever hearing a word of testimony. The story continues through all it influenced, such as Stephen King, who became a horror writer because of it, Bruce Springsteen, who wrote a whole album about it, Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, Martin Sheen, and Peter Jackson, who wrote his first major movie based on the Starkweather-Fugate incident.Pro Bono explores aspects of this incredible story that have never been revealed before, and sheds new light on these terrifying and complex events.
The Bride Price
Mai Neng Moua - 2017
Mai Neng, who knows the pain this tradition has caused, says no. Her husband-to-be supports her choice.What happens next is devastating, and it raises questions about the very meaning of being Hmong in America. The couple refuses to participate in the tshoob, the traditional Hmong marriage ceremony; many members of their families, on both sides, stay away from their church wedding. Months later, the families carry out the tshoob without the wedding couple. But even after the bride price has been paid, Mai Neng finds herself outside of Hmong culture and at odds with her mother, not realizing the full meaning of the customs she has rejected. As she navigates the Hmong world of animism, Christianity, and traditional gender roles, she begins to learn what she has not been taught. Through a trip to Thailand, through hard work in the garden, through the birth of another generation, one strong woman seeks reconciliation with another.
Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places
Leeana Tankersley - 2009
After a whirlwind courtship, a move across the world, and the unexpectedly difficult re-entry from a year overseas, Leeana finds her life (and her soul) has been changed forever.With an artist’s eye, Tankersley uses each chapter to piece together moments and memories from her journey—a handwritten note from Kuwait, a braid of fringe from a Persian rug, an original poem, a bit of basting thread, a swatch of black silk from a borrowed abaya, a mesquite leaf, a Navy SEAL trident, a receipt from the Russian-Georgian restaurant on Louisiana Street—to create a work of unexpected beauty.Found art emerges … a literary collage created from salvaged stories of loss, hope, and belief that just might change your soul, too.
Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women
Andrea Gabor - 1995
Among the women she profiles are Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown, and Mileva Maric Einstein, the scientist whose marriage to Einstein ended in tragedy.
The Irish Slaves
Rhetta Akamatsu - 2010
They were helpless. It sounds like a familiar story, but these people were not African. They were Irish, and they were slaves before African slavery became widespread. This is their story.
Camp Nurse: My Adventures at Summer Camp
Tilda Shalof - 2009
It’s an experience we remember vividly; a time of food fights and cabin raids, first kisses and bittersweet heartbreaks, endless days of sun and fun away from parents. But there’s one person who has a take on camp unlike anyone else: the camp nurse.Camp Nurse reveals what it’s like to be the person kids turn to for help, comfort, and advice. Throughout nurse Tilda Shalof’s six summers at camp, kids troop through the infirmary with a variety of ordinary—as well as some extraordinary—complaints, questions, and ailments, including the symptom endemic to every summer camp: homesickness. Along the way she discovers it’s often the emotional boo-boos that need more attention than the bug bites, poison ivy, and scrapes and scratches that come with the territory.Camp Nurse is funny, entertaining, insightful, and above all heartwarming. It’s filled with all the twinges of nostalgia one expects to get when remembering long-ago summers at camp.Praise for Tilda Shalof’s other books:
“A cracking good read.”
– Quill & Quire
“The best-seller no one can put down.”
– Montreal Gazette
The Negro Leagues: Celebrating Baseball's Unsung Heroes
Matt Doeden - 2017
While racism was rampant, some early teams featured black and white players competing side by side. But by 1900, segregation forced African Americans to form their own teams. Black players traveled around the country on barnstorming tours, taking on all challengers. In 1920, baseball's Negro leagues started, and for more than three decades, they offered fans a thrilling alternative to Major League Baseball. Explore the riveting history of the Negro leagues, including some of baseball's greatest (and most unheralded) players, biggest games, and wildest moments.
Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront
Nathan Ward - 2010
Johnson’s hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government’s dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became mustsee television.Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.
Snakes and Ladders
Angela Williams - 2020
A traumatic, violent upbringing saw to that. But after serving a short sentence for theft as a teenager, she worked hard to break the cycle. Thirteen years later Angela was studying, teaching, providing a stable home for her son, and finally feeling like she'd got her life together. Then she got hit by a postie bike. Police realised that Angela still had ten months to go on the prison sentence she'd thought was in her distant past. However, Angela was a different prisoner the second time around: no longer a scared, damaged nineteen-year-old, she knew how to speak up for herself and her fellow prisoners against a system of power, privilege and cruelty that controls the lives of Australia's most vulnerable women and offers little hope for redemption. With unwavering courage, intelligence and humour, SNAKES AND LADDERS reveals an astonishing true story of falling through the cracks, and what it takes to climb back out again.
Plant a Geranium in Your Cranium: Planting Seeds of Joy in the Manure of Life
Barbara Johnson - 2002
But, then, I never wanted to be in AARP, either!"Barbara Johnson laughingly lifted millions of readers out of the depths of despair with her book Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy. In that classic volume of humor and encouragement, she shared how God's gift of joy helped her survive the deaths of two sons and the eleven-year estrangement of another son who was lost in the homosexual lifestyle.Now that same laughter-lined attitude has sustained Barbara during a life-threatening battle with cancer?a battle in which she never lost her bubble of joy. Plant a Geranium in Your Cranium is the inspiring yet funny story of Barbara's journey through a year of illness, frustration?and abundant humor. It's a joyful chronicle of her own experiences combined with dozens of hilarious anecdotes and cartoons sent to her by others who share her belief in the healing power of laughter.
How May I Help You?: An Immigrant's Journey from MBA to Minimum Wage
Deepak Singh - 2017
Armed with an MBA from India, Singh can get only a minimum-wage job in an electronics store. Every day he confronts unfamiliar American mores, from strange idioms to deeply entrenched racism. Telling stories through the unique lens of an initially credulous outsider who is “fresh off the plane,” Singh learns about the struggles of his colleagues: Ron, a middle-aged African-American man trying to keep his life intact despite health concerns; Jackie, a young African-American woman diligently attending school after work; and Cindy, whose matter-of-fact attitude helps Deepak adapt to his job and his new life. How May I Help You? is an incisive take on life in the United States and a reminder that the stories of low-wage employees can bring candor and humanity to debates about work, race, and immigration.
In the Red: The Diary of a Recovering Shopaholic
Alexis Hall - 2008
'In the Red' is Alexis Hall's diary - full of fashion and frustration - as she battles to transform herself from a spending junkie to a scrupulous saver.
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.