Book picks similar to
Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa by John Biggers
africa
visual-arts
worldview-total-recall
anthroapologies
Redemption: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last 31 Hours
Joseph Rosenbloom - 2018
It draws on dozens of interviews by the author with people who were immersed in the Memphis events, as well as on recently released documents from archives in Atlanta. The fresh material yields a wealth of illuminating detail, including a lapse, never before reported, by the Memphis Police Department to provide security for King. It unveils the financial and logistical predicament presented by the Poor People's Campaign. It recounts the emotional and marital pressures that were bedeviling King in the spring of 1968. Juxtaposed next to the narrative describing King's hours in Memphis is an account of what his assassin, James Earl Ray, was doing in Memphis during the same time. The book discloses how a series of uncannily lucky breaks enabled Ray, a bumbling convict on the lam, to construct a sniper's nest and shoot King.
You are STILL Being Lied To: The NEW Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes, and Cultural Myths
Russ Kick - 2008
A world where real dangers are downplayed and nonexistent dangers are trumpeted. In short, a world where you are being lied to.
Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America
Tamara Draut - 2016
But the working class we have now--far more female and racially diverse and employed by the fast food, retail, health care, and other service industries--has been marginalized, if not ignored, by politicians and pundits. This is changing, swiftly and dramatically.Today's working class is a sleeping giant. And as Tamara Draut makes abundantly clear, it is just now waking up to its untapped political power. Sleeping Giant is the first major examination of the new working class and the role it will play in our economic and political future. Blending moving individual narratives, historical background, and sophisticated analysis, Draut forcefully argues that this newly energized class is far along in the process of changing America for the better.Draut examines the legacy of exclusion based on race and gender that contributes to the invisibility of the new working class, despite their entwinement in everyone's day-to-day life. No longer confined to the assembly line, today's working class watches our children and cares for our parents. They park our cars, screen our luggage, clean our offices, and cook and serve our meals. They are us.With "Fight for $15" minimum-wage protests popping up throughout the country (and in some places winning) and economic inequality being recognized as one of the defining issues of our time, today's working class will soon become impossible to ignore and foolish to dismiss. Sleeping Giant is the first book to tell the story of this extraordinary transformation in full and inspiring detail.
Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing
Emma Dexter - 2005
In the following and largest section of the book (over 300 pages and approximately 500 illustrations), the 100 or more artists are presented in an A to Z order. Some artists are presented on 2 pages, some on 4 pages. About 5 selections of work are reproduced for each artist, along a text written by an author who is a specialist on the artist's work. The 500-word texts are brief surveys of the artist's career to date, and aim at introducing the methods and subject matter at issue in their recent works. A selected list of exhibitions and bibliography also complements the reproductions and text on each artist.
The Karma Of Brown Folk
Vijay Prashad - 2000
E. B. Du Bois of black Americans in his classic The Souls of Black Folk. A hundred years later, Vijay Prashad asks South Asians, "How does it feel to be a solution?"In this kaleidoscopic critique, Prashad looks into the complexities faced by the members of a model minority—one, he claims, that is consistently deployed as a weapon in the war against black America. On a vast canvas, The Karma of Brown Folk attacks the two pillars of the model minority image—that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant—and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes.Prashad uses irony, humor, razor-sharp criticism, personal reflections, and historical research to challenge the arguments made by Dinesh DSouza, who heralds South Asian success in the U.S., and to question the quiet accommodation to racism made by many South Asians. A look at Deepak Chopra and others whom Prashad terms Godmen shows us how some South Asians exploit the stereotype of inherent spirituality, much to the chagrin of other South Asians.Following the long engagement of American culture with South Asia, Prashad traces India's effect on thinkers like Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau, Ravi Shankar's influence on John Coltrane, and such essential issues as race versus caste and the connection between antiracism activism and anticolonial resistance. The Karma of Brown Folk locates the birth of the model minority myth, placing it firmly in the context of reaction to the struggle for Black Liberation. Prashad reclaims the long history of black and South Asian solidarity, discussing joint struggles in the U.S., the Caribbean, South Africa, and elsewhere, and exposes how these powerful moments of alliance faded from historical memory and were replaced by Indian support for antiblack racism.Ultimately, Prashad writes not just about South Asians in America but about America itself, in the tradition of Tocqueville, Du Bois, Richard Wright, and others. He explores the place of collective struggle and multiracial alliances in the transformation of self and community--in short, how Americans define themselves.Vijay Prashad is assistant professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Mountain People
Colin M. Turnbull - 1972
Turnbull, the celebrated author of the classic 'The Forest People', describes the dehumanization of the Ik, African tribesmen who in less than three generations have deteriorated from being once-prosperous hunters to scattered bands of hostile, starving people whose only goal is individual survival.
All Things Censored
Mumia Abu-Jamal - 2000
Abu-Jamal writes on many different topics, including the ironies that abound within the U.S. prison system and the consequences of those ironies, and his own case. Mumia's composure, humor, and connection to the living world around him represents an irrefutable victory over the "corrections" system that has for two decades sought to isolate and silence him.The title, All Things Censored, refers to Mumia's hiring as an on-air columnist by National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," and subsequent banning from that venue under pressure from law and order groups.
Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth
Derrick A. Bell - 2002
As one of America's most influential law professors, Derrick Bell has spent a lifetime helping students struggling to maintain a sense of integrity in the face of an overwhelming pressure to succeed at any price. The result of a meditation on Bell's own achievements, Ethical Ambition is a deeply affecting, uplifting, and thoughtful work that not only challenges us to face some of the most difficult questions that life presents, but also dares to offer solutions.
The Rage of a Privileged Class
Ellis Cose - 1993
A controversial and widely heralded look at the race-related pain and anger felt by the most respected, best educated, and wealthiest members of the black community.
Prophesy Deliverance!
Cornel West - 1982
He challenges African Americans to consider the incorporation of Marxism into their theological perspectives, thereby adopting the mindset that it is class more so than race that renders one powerless in America. Armed with a new introduction by the author, this Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Prophesy Deliverance! is a must have.
Cindy Sherman: Retrospective
Cindy Sherman - 1997
Her art embodies two developments in the art world: the impact of postmodern theory on art practice; and the rise of photography and mass-media techniques as modes of artistic expression.
Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience
Jill Nelson - 1993
Instead, she discovered that life at The Post meant walking "the thin line between Uncle Tomming and Mau-Mauing" - between holding onto her job and preserving her soul.As Nelson recounts her harrowing four years at The Post - along with her odyssey from a middle-class childhood to near poverty, divorce and single motherhood, flame-out love affairs, and a nervous breakdown - she gives us a scalding expose of the racial, sexual, and corporate politics of one of our most respected newspapers. Volunteer Slavery is a funny, fiercely candid book that names names and takes no prisoners.
Nothing in this book is true but it's exactly the way things are
Bob Frissel - 2007
Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown
Javier Auyero - 2008
So are its nearly five thousand sickened and frail inhabitants. How do poor people make sense of and cope with toxic pollution? Why do they fail to understand what is objectively a clear and present danger? How are perceptions and misperceptionsshared within a community?Based on archival research and two and a half years of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in Flammable, this book examines the lived experiences of environmental suffering. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, residents allow themselves to doubt or even deny the hard facts of industrialpollution. This happens, the authors argue, through a labor of confusion enabled by state officials who frequently raise the issue of relocation and just as frequently suspend it; by the companies who fund local health care but assert that the area is unfit for human residence; by doctors who saythe illnesses are no different from anywhere else but tell mothers they must leave the neighborhood if their families are to be cured; by journalists who randomly appear and focus on the most extreme aspects of life there; and by lawyers who encourage residents to hold out for a settlement. Thesecontradictory actions, advice, and information work together to shape the confused experience of living in danger and ultimately translates into a long, ineffective, and uncertain waiting time, a time dictated by powerful interests and shared by all marginalized groups.With luminous and vivid descriptions of everyday life in the neighborhood, Auyero and Swistun depict this on-going slow motion human and environmental disaster and dissect the manifold ways in which it is experienced by Flammable residents.