This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate


Naomi Klein - 2014
    It's not about carbon—it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better. In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers Shock Doctrine and No Logo, exposes the myths that are clouding climate debate. You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it's impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the 'free-market' playbook. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring. It's about changing the world, before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. Either we leap—or we sink. This Changes Everything is a book that will redefine our era.

Have a Bleedin Guess - the story of Hex Enduction Hour


Paul Hanley - 2019
    Even the circumstances of its recording, purportedly in an abandoned cinema and a cave formed from Icelandic lava, have achieved legendary status among their ever-loyal fanbase. Have a Bleedin Guess tells the story of the album, including how each song was written, performed and recorded. It also includes new interviews with key players. Author Paul Hanley, who was one of The Fall's two drummers when Hex was created, is uniquely placed to discuss the album's impact, both when it was released and in the ensuing years.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls


Jessica McDiarmid - 2019
    The highway is known as the 'Highway of Tears', and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist, Jessica McDiarmid, investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to 4,000--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing, and murdered, Indigenous women, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.

Ok Boomer, Let's Talk: A Millennial Defense of Our Generation


Jill Filipovic - 2020
    In this eye-opening book, journalist Jill Filipovic breaks down the massive problems facing Millennials including climate, money, housing, and healthcare. In Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk, journalist (and Millennial) Jill Filipovic tells the definitive story of her generation—and it’s no joke. Talking to gig workers, economists, policy makers, and dozens of struggling Millennials drowning in debt on a planet quite literally in flames, Filipovic paints a shocking and nuanced portrait of a generation being left behind: -Millennials are the most educated generation in American history—and also the most broke. -Millennials hold just 3 percent of American wealth. When they were the same age, Boomers held 21 percent. -The average older Millennial has $15,000 in student loan debt. The average Boomer at the same age? Just $2,300 in today’s dollars. -Millennials are paying almost 40 percent more for their first homes than Boomers did. -American families spend twice as much on healthcare now than they did when Boomers were young parents. Filipovic shows that Millennials are not the avocado-toast-eating snowflakes of Boomer outrage fantasies. But they are the first American generation that will do worse than their parents. “OK, Boomer” isn’t just a sarcastic dismissal—it’s a recognition that Millennials are in crisis, and that Boomer voters, bankers, and policy makers are responsible. Filipovic goes beyond the meme, upending dated assumptions with revelatory data and revealing portraits of young people delaying adulthood to pay down debt, obsessed with “wellness” because they can’t afford real healthcare, and struggling to #hustle in the precarious gig economy. Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk is at once an explainer and an extended olive branch that will finally allow these two generations to truly understand each other.

Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement


Marshall Ganz - 2008
    Since the 1900s, large-scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor--a cheap, unorganized, and powerless workforce. In1965, when some 800 Filipino grape workers began to strike under the aegis of the AFL-CIO, the UFW soon joined the action with 2,000 Mexican workers and turned the strike into a civil rights struggle. They engaged in civil disobedience, mobilized support from churches and students, boycottedgrowers, and transformed their struggle into La Causa, a farm workers' movement that eventually triumphed over the grape industry's Goliath. Why did they succeed? How can the powerless challenge the powerful successfully?Offering insight from a longtime movement organizer and scholar, Ganz illustrates how they had the ability and resourcefulness to devise good strategy and turn short-term advantages into long-term gains. Authoritative in scholarship and magisterial in scope, this book constitutes a seminalcontribution to learning from the movement's struggles, set-backs, and successes.

Durable Inequality


Charles Tilly - 1998
    How, he asks, do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances arise, and how do they come to distinguish members of different socially defined categories of persons? Exploring representative paired and unequal categories, such as male/female, black/white, and citizen/noncitizen, Tilly argues that the basic causes of these and similar inequalities greatly resemble one another. In contrast to contemporary analyses that explain inequality case by case, this account is one of process. Categorical distinctions arise, Tilly says, because they offer a solution to pressing organizational problems. Whatever the "organization" is—as small as a household or as large as a government—the resulting relationship of inequality persists because parties on both sides of the categorical divide come to depend on that solution, despite its drawbacks. Tilly illustrates the social mechanisms that create and maintain paired and unequal categories with a rich variety of cases, mapping out fertile territories for future relational study of durable inequality.

Black and British: A Forgotten History


David Olusoga - 2016
    Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare's Othello.It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain's global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of the First World War. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.

Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II Have Been Prevented?


Richard M. Langworth - 2015
    Churchill, 1948: World War II was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable. Here is a transformative view of Churchill’s theories, prescriptions, actions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows that he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. It is based on what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years, thoroughly referenced in Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries. Richard M. Langworth began his Churchill work in 1968 when he organized the Churchill Study Unit, which later became the Churchill Centre. He served as its president and board chairman and was editor of its journal Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014. In November 2014, he was appointed senior fellow for Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project. Mr. Langworth published the first American edition of Churchill’s India, is the author of A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, and is the editor of Churchill by Himself, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, The Patriot’s Churchill, All Will Be Well: Good Advice from Winston Churchill, and Churchill in His Own Words. His next book is Winston Churchill, Urban Myths and Reality. In 1998, Richard Langworth was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by HM The Queen “for services to Anglo-American understanding and the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.”

Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them


Ted Danson - 2011
    But fewer realize that over the course of the past two and a half decades, Danson has tirelessly devoted himself to the cause of heading off a looming global catastrophe—the massive destruction of our planet's oceanic biosystems and the complete collapse of the world's major commercial fisheries.In Oceana, Danson details his journey from joining a modest local protest in the mid-1980s to oppose offshore oil drilling near his Southern California neighborhood to his current status as one of the world's most influential oceanic environmental activists, testifying before congressional committees in Washington, D.C., addressing the World Trade Organization in Zurich, Switzerland, and helping found Oceana, the largest organization in the world focused solely on ocean conservation.In his incisive, conversational voice, Danson describes what has happened to our oceans in just the past half-century, ranging from the ravages of overfishing and habitat destruction to the devastating effects of ocean acidification and the wasteful horrors of fish farms. Danson also shares the stage of Oceana with some of the world's most respected authorities in the fields of marine science, commercial fishing, and environmental law, as well as with other influential activists.Combining vivid, personal prose with an array of stunning graphics, charts, and photographs, Oceana powerfully illustrates the impending crises and offers solutions that may allow us to avert them, showing you the specific courses of action you can take to become active, responsible stewards of our planet's most precious resource—its oceans.

Invisible Chains: Canada's Underground World of Human Trafficking


Benjamin Perrin - 2010
    A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community. The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plain sight. In Invisible Chains, Benjamin Perrin, an award-winning law professor and policy expert, exposes cases of human trafficking, recording in-depth interviews with people on the front lines—police officers, social workers, and the victims themselves—and bringing to light government records released under access-to-information laws.

The Black Donnellys: The Outrageous Tale of Canada's Deadliest Feud


Nate Hendley - 2004
    A knee to the groin, a thumb to an eye, all was fair as long as a Donnelly prevailed." "Hit first, talk later," she told her boys. This book will be especially fascinating for all readers interested in: crime biography. The gruesome saga of the Black Donnellys has been heavily mythologized. A thick layer of rumour, legend, and hearsay has built up around the facts of the case. But one thing is clear. No one who reads this book will ever forget the murderous events that occurred near the town of Lucan, Ontario in the 1870s.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth


Linda McQuaig - 2019
    Another popular movement succeeded in establishing Canada’s public broadcasting system to counter American dominance of the airwaves. And a Canadian doctor created a publicly-owned laboratory that saved countless lives by producing affordable medications, contributing to medical breakthroughs and helping eradicate smallpox throughout the world.In recent decades, however, Canadians have allowed their inspiring public enterprises to be privatized and their vital public programs downsized, leaving them increasingly dominated by the forces of private greed that rule the marketplace.In this provocative book, Linda McQuaig challenges the dogma of privatization that has defined our political age. She argues that, particularly now as we grapple with climate change and income inequality, we need to expand, not shrink, our public sphere.

Punishment and Inequality in America


Bruce Western - 2006
    For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting tough on crime with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.i

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice


Paul Butler - 2009
    The Volokh Conspiracy calls Butler’s account of his trial “the most riveting first chapter I have ever read.”In a book Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree calls “a must read,” Butler looks at places where ordinary citizens meet the justice system—as jurors, witnesses, and in encounters with the police—and explores what “doing the right thing” means in a corrupt system.Since Let’s Get Free’s publication in spring 2009, Butler has become the go-to person for commentary on criminal justice and race relations: he appeared on ABC News, Good Morning America, and Fox News, published op-eds in the New York Times and other national papers, and is in demand to speak across the country. The paperback edition brings Butler’s groundbreaking and highly controversial arguments—jury nullification (voting “not guilty” in drug cases as a form of protest), just saying “no” when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the system as a snitch or a prosecutor—to a whole new audience.

Peter Mansbridge One on One: Favourite Conversations and the Stories Behind Them


Peter Mansbridge - 2009
    In this, his first book, he collects the most illuminating and timely interviews from the past ten years, book-ending each with his behind-the-scenes recollections and anecdotes. Mansbridge acts as our guide as we get the inside story from prominent figures from all walks of life, including world leaders, music legends and sports heroes.Among the more than 40 interviewees included in the book are:Bill ClintonSidney CrosbyBill GatesDiana KrallBenjamin NetanyahuBarack ObamaShimon PeresDesmond TutuBrian Wilson