Abstract
Books
A son of poor Mexican immigrants who got his education at Harvard and Yale draws on his varied experiences in this collection of short stories.
A hundred creative poems by a diverse collection of young writers express how they experience today’s world.
A fourteen-year-old girl moves to a small town in the Dakotas with her white father after her mother, who was half Korean and half Chinese, has died. There, she has to cope with racism that makes this engaging novel for children a far cry from Little House on the Prairie.
The woman who is the main character unexpectedly becomes a small-town sheriff after serving in the Army and working as a cook. With the texture of life in that community as a backdrop, the story takes a turn when the previous sheriff disappears.
In this well-written novel that reads like a diary, a twenty-eight-year-old man moves from the United States to Sweden, his mother’s home country. The book traces this young man’s thoughts and experiences related to immigration, capitalism, addiction, loneliness, and the relationship between those with privilege and those without.
An extraordinary collection of short stories, essays, poems, and reporting by well-known writers from more than two dozen countries focuses on what climate change and inequality mean in the lives of people all over the world.
The seamy underside of major league baseball is the subject of this novel in which a star player fights addiction, while more marginal players, coaches, female hangers-on, agents, and writers struggle to stay relevant.
Those who hold power at the top of the U.S. economy have always used immigrant bashing as a political tool at the same time that they have depended on labor from other countries. A journalist shows that Trump is just the culmination of anti-immigrant racism under both major parties that is connected to economic and trade policy, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and more.
In the wake of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, the authors advocate electing more progressives at every level of government. They also encourage progressives to get jobs where they can help organize unions or reform unions that already exist.
Using their economic power to shape public policy, banks and other wealthy speculators have captured a dramatically increased share of housing and other real estate. Blackstone, a so-called private equity firm, is now the world’s biggest landlord, while the rate of homeownership in the United States is at a fifty-year low and there is no county where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford the average two-bedroom apartment. An urban planner shows that these developments are the result of deliberate strategies by the richest 1 percent and suggests alternatives.
Two economists, writing before Covid-19, draw attention to some of the ways that growing inequality of wealth and opportunity under U.S. capitalism today is devastating white working-class communities, as reflected in declining life expectancy, physical health, and marriage stability and rising rates of suicide and addiction. For decades, these same impacts in communities of color were ascribed by the powers that be to presumed cultural weaknesses. But in documenting the current crisis among non-college-educated white workers, these academics point to the destruction of better-paying union jobs, corporate control of public policy, and the costly, often destructive health care “system” as major culprits.
Drawing on a huge archive of previously unpublished correspondence and recordings, a Polish journalist and outstanding storyteller brings alive the experiences of immigrants who ended up at Ellis Island, as well as the wide range of employees who dealt with them. It is a story that remains relevant today.
A short introduction to the concept of environmental justice focuses on case studies such as Standing Rock, Flint, Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, Kivalina (Alaska), and California’s Central Valley.
Past successes of progressive movements have shown the importance of directly targeting big corporations and not just elected officials.
In 1919, Seattle’s workers engaged in a general strike for five days, shutting down the operations of big corporate interests and organizing themselves to ensure that households’ needs were met. This lively account shows how that historic event came about, and in the process tells valuable history of the Pacific Northwest and of class in America.
The author mixes an academic treatise with accessible descriptions of his experiences working with poetry workshops involving workers in the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Panama, and the Netherlands.
A collection of more than two dozen essays that often deal with how science and nature intersect with racism, sexism, climate change, and other issues. One of the pieces, “When the Next Plague Hits,” was published in The Atlantic in July 2018 and laid out in detail the failure of U.S. politicians to prepare for the next inevitable pandemic.
Economic inequality and insecurity is taking a toll on families. Yet, public policy dominated by big corporations and the 1 percent fails to provide families the support they need.
This book explains for workers in unionized workplaces how unions work, what makes them strong, how to address problems with management, and more. A companion sixteen-page pamphlet for new employees is called “Welcome to the Union.”
Images of Indigenous people in the United States by white photographers have received plenty of attention over the years. This author focuses on photographs taken by native photographers themselves, including both professionals and amateurs.
Films
A fifty-minute documentary shows the blatantly racist propaganda that was aimed at Japanese Americans during World War II as a prelude to imprisoning them in harsh, remote camps. The film draws on their diaries, photos of their situation by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, and internal government documents from that time that show officials acknowledging that the supposed threat to national security was a willful lie.
The drama of this feature starring Mark Ruffalo is heightened by knowing that it is based on a true story. A young lawyer has just made partner at a firm that represents chemical companies when he is approached by a West Virginia farmer who believes that he and his community are being poisoned by pollution from a DuPont chemical plant. At great personal cost, the lawyer gradually gets sucked into uncovering DuPont’s wrongdoing and seeking justice.
Working on an isolated family farm in northern England, a young man has become numb to the world until a Romanian man his age is hired to help out, and he discovers emotions he did not know he had.
A twenty-year-old Swedish woman has been supporting herself through prostitution. When she discovers a passion for music, a married conductor takes advantage of her, until the plot takes an unusual “Me Too” twist.
Ken Loach’s latest feature film is not to be confused with another recent masterpiece, “Sorry to Bother You,” by Boots Riley. Both are must-see films for our time. Loach portrays a couple—a delivery driver and a home health aide—who want to provide a better future for their kids but who work in the so-called “gig economy” as “independent contractors” for whom all the benefits of employment have been stripped away. The juxtaposition of their family’s caring humanity and the brutality of these new job arrangements builds to an intense dramatic crescendo.
Emma Thompson stars as a British judge who has become so consumed with the difficult cases she must decide that her marriage is falling apart just as she takes on one of the most vexing legal issues yet.
Spectacular acting and a touching story are the hallmarks of this feature about a small-town police officer who is trying hard to do the right thing while coping with his mother’s death, an impending divorce, and difficulties relating to his young daughter.
