Abstract
Books
A Japanese-American graduate student from a working-class background gets drawn into the dark secrets of entitled, old-money families that have dominated Los Angeles for generations.
Born of Korean immigrants but adopted by a white couple in a small Oregon community, the author talks candidly about feeling out of place while growing up and about her complicated emotions when she found her birth parents.
Robinson, a former president of Ireland, and writer Caitriona Palmer recount stories of women taking action for climate justice in Uganda, the Arctic, Australia, Pacific Islands, Vietnam, the U.S. Gulf Coast, and more.
For decades, a multinational company operated a copper smelter in El Paso, Texas, exposing workers and the local community to deadly toxins. Two researchers use this case study, including interviews with dozens of ex-workers, as an introduction to the issue of environmental justice.
A skillful combination of personal memoir and social analysis yields an engaging and sympathetic human portrait of the toll on hard-working rural families that has followed the destruction of family farms, the defunding of public services, and the corporate assault on living wage levels.
Individuals or corporations that amass great wealth through tax loopholes, subsidies, inheritance, exploitation of labor and the environment, or overcharging consumers are then rewarded with further tax benefits when they give away a small portion of their money, while gaining even more control over what should be democratically determined public policy.
An unusual mystery novel centers on a woman in her thirties who works as a law enforcement ranger for the national park service in Canada. Investigating a proposal by outside financial interests to build a huge new ski resort in a protected wilderness area, she begins to uncover deep layers of corruption and even violence as controversy rips the local community apart.
In rural Australia, the lives of five characters, each desperate in his or her own way, ominously intersect against a backdrop of a mining protest, animal rustling, and financial manipulation.
This upbeat novel for middle school and high school students provides a nuanced view of a variety of immigrant experiences. The main character is a Muslim girl who wants to play on her school’s basketball team but is faced with league rules that say players cannot wear a hijab.
A young writer who is out of options in life agrees to help start a school for Christian poets and novelists on the Gulf Coast, only to find herself in over her head as venture capitalists and a for-profit education company get involved. Boggs expertly creates likable, complex characters who reach across a cultural gulf between them as the story develops.
A border agent shares excerpts from his diary, with a major focus on the desperation of people he spent much of his time rescuing after they put their health and lives in jeopardy in order to cross into the United States.
A journalist moved to North Dakota to delve into the lives of women and men caught up in the oil and gas boom that, like previous extraction booms in the West, has left human and environmental destruction in its wake.
In February 1933, two dozen heads of the largest corporations in Germany met secretly with Hitler to provide financing for a Nazi takeover. This short book goes from there to the invasion of Austria, the use of concentration camp labor by some of those same corporations, and the Nuremberg trials after the war.
Two women—one a sheriff’s wife and one a union organizer—are at the center of this mystery novel set in a coal mining community in Ohio in the 1920s.
A Super Bowl champion talks in a frank conversational style about his experiences as a black man, football player, outspoken activist, and donor to projects that empower girls of color. He shares his perspective on building a united movement to address issues of race, class, and gender.
After the 2020 census, state legislatures will have the chance to redraw boundaries for congressional districts. This eighty-four-page paperback tells how activists in Pennsylvania successfully challenged gerrymandering by the legislative majority after the 2010 census.
Films
Netflix.com, 2018
In Iceland, a single mom struggling to get by forms an unexpected bond with an asylum-seeker from Guinea-Bissau.
Blindspottingmovie.com, 2018
Two lifelong friends in Oakland, CA, one black, one white, try to survive against the odds in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
Columbusthemovie.com, 2017
The son of an architecture professor from Korea who has come to Columbus, Indiana, because his father is dying there develops a friendship with a younger, local woman who would like to pursue a career in architecture but is committed to helping her mother overcome substance addictions. Striking images of the town’s many modernist buildings are featured throughout the film.
Cinemaguild.com, 2018
A down-to-earth feature film follows the lives of a group of undocumented Mexican men working in Brooklyn.
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2018
This hour-long documentary tells a dramatic and inspiring story of how a grassroots movement can affect public policy to bring about social change, and how civil rights and universal health care are interrelated. Before Medicare was enacted in the 1960s, fewer than half of the nation’s hospitals served black and white patients equally, and one-third of southern hospitals refused service to black people at all. Black activists and white allies successfully persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to insist on integration by any hospital that would receive funding from the new Medicare program.
Firstrunfeatures.com, 2017
Japanese Americans whose constitutional rights were violated when they were imprisoned at remote camps during World War II organized to protest the government’s treatment of them, including unsafe working conditions and lack of adequate medical care. Their courageous resistance within the camps was met with military force.
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2018
Lynn Margulis was a scientist who braved sexist opposition to put forward evidence that evolution is driven by cooperation among organisms and not just survival-of-the-fittest competition.
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2018
A touching ninety-one-minute documentary follows four Syrian refugee families during their first eight months in Baltimore as they try to adapt to a different culture and find jobs that pay enough to support them.
Musicboxfilms.com, 2018
Identities and time periods are blurred as refugees from fascism meet in the port city of Marseille in hopes of escaping to safety.
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2017
Over a five-year period, Pennsylvania residents organized to challenge an industry and state government cover-up of pollution of their drinking water and rural watershed as a result of fracking.
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, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cirque, and many other publications.