Abstract
Books
Teachers who were involved in the nine-day strike in West Virginia in February 2018 talk honestly about their experiences before, during, and after.
African-American men and boys in a variety of situations are the main subjects of nine high-quality, expressively written short stories.
Two activists spent a year living outdoors in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. They were there to take photos and do media work, using solar power, to draw attention to proposed copper mining by a Chilean corporation that would put mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxins into that ecosystem for centuries.
Project Censored provides leading examples of recent stories that the corporate media distorted or failed to report while reporting “junk news” instead. The rest of the book describes inno-vative efforts by a variety of activists to create alternatives and change media narratives.
Many issues related to the events in Charlot-tesville in August 2017 are explored in more than two dozen thoughtful essays.
In more than six hundred pages, a historian explores the relationship between events like the Wall Street bailout, economic crises in countries such as Greece, increasing scapegoating of China, and the rise of Trump.
As a local sheriff and his wife investigate a murder, we get a glimpse into the life of a small Dust Bowl community during the Great Depression.
A researcher lists and describes the corporate and financial powers that control economic and political decision making, as well as the military and media forces that help keep them in power.
A fascinating book draws on more than 150 interviews to tell the story of a number of African-American families with roots in Appalachia. They escaped the Deep South by taking jobs in U.S. Steel’s coal mines in Harlan County, Kentucky, and then migrated to big cities in the North when the company curtailed operations. It’s a story of racism and exploitation but also of community resilience. Brown augments the first-person accounts with succinct history about the use of convict labor in Alabama, the relationship between African-Americans and Eastern European immigrants brought to America to work in the mines, the complexity of school integration, and much more.
Big corporations have gained more influence over our education system, claiming a need to prepare students to “compete in the global economy.” But their real agenda includes dodging taxation to pay for schools, profiting from privatization, and ensuring that the curriculum does not explore the root causes of the growing gap in wealth and power between those at the top and the rest of us.
An anthology presents work by twenty-one poets with a wide variety of styles and tribal backgrounds.
A distinctly Latin-American novel mixes magical realism and mystery in a story that includes disappearances of women and threatened exploitation of local forests by a multinational company.
Many books have portrayed people in the Midwest who voted for Trump. This interesting collection of twenty-five personal accounts shares experiences of progressives in the “heartland.”
Armed outsiders from other states took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, hoping to spark a rebellion against the federal government. Local ranchers, loggers, and other residents who had participated for years in collaborative problem-solving processes with federal officials in their area overwhelmingly opposed the takeover. Walker gives them an opportunity to share their experience and perspective.
A co-editor of Inequality.org makes a case for using tax systems and other public policies to reduce the growing shift of wealth from working people to the top 1 percent.
A vivid novel describes the lives of women who end up in a women’s prison. Kushner has spent many hours visiting such a prison in California as a volunteer for Justice Now. She hired an ex-prisoner who is one of that group’s leaders as a consultant to help make the book as realistic as possible.
A short, recently updated sixty-three-page paperback provides accessible information on current scientific knowledge about climate change, best estimates of impacts to come, and potential benefits if we take action now.
At a time when some in America view the FBI and CIA as principled counterweights to the Trump administration, a project called MuckRock regularly requests past FBI surveillance files on individuals or organizations and publishes the results. This book contains actual FBI files on such writers as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Tom Clancy, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, and more.
Films
Kimstim.com, 2018
When a teenager in a small town in China witnesses a sexual assault of two younger girls, all three of them find that no adult will publicly stand with them.
StrandReleasing.com, 2018
In this unusually touching feature, a German man who works in a bakery is having an affair with a married Israeli man who comes once a month to Berlin on business. When the Israeli dies suddenly in a car crash back home, the baker goes to find the man’s wife.
A warm but not sappy feature about hope and redemption is based on the autobiography of John Callahan, an alcoholic who was confined to a wheelchair after a car accident in his early twenties. He was persuaded to join an AA group and became well known for his edgy cartoons.
In this highly engaging story, a war veteran with PTSD lives in the woods on public land with his teenage daughter, hiding from virtually all contact with society. After they are caught, she begins to ask new questions about her future.
An impulsive 17-year-old Israeli boy who is prone to saying out loud what others would keep to themselves bonds with a teacher, while his father pushes him to take over the family scaffolding business.
JanusFilms.com, 2017
The paths of a grumpy Finnish restaurant owner and a determined Syrian refugee cross in this quirky feature.
TheSeparationMyth.com, 2017
Filmmaker Nisha Burton has so far produced three short documentaries in this series dealing with race, including “Whose Utopia?: Exclusion in Oregon,” which recounts the state’s founding with a constitution that explicitly barred people of color from living within its boundaries.
Kinolorber.com, 2017
A gripping feature focuses on a 16-year-old Pakistani girl raised in Norway who pays the price for being caught between her adopted culture and her parents’ strict ideas about the proper role of women.
This darkly realistic feature, filmed dramatically in black and white, shows life on a remote mountain farm in Brazil in the early 1800s. The white farmer marries his young niece, who relates better to his numerous slaves than to him.
Footnotes
Author Biography
. He is communications consultant for the Rogue Action Center, Rogue Climate, and other community organizations in Oregon. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Cirque, and many other publications.