Abstract
Books
Fiction
Damnation Spring
By Ash Davidson
Scribner, 2021
An extraordinary novel sympathetically portrays working-class families in northernmost California who are dependent on the logging of redwoods but suffer from exposure to herbicides their employers use in the woods.
Of Women and Salt
By Gabriela Garcia
Flatiron, 2021
Two threads run through this vivid novel: the challenges faced by multiple generations of Cuban women in a “man’s world,” and the trauma caused for Central American women and girls by U.S. immigration policy.
The Prettiest Star
By Carter Sickels
Hub City, 2020
It is 1986, and a young man who had to leave his small Appalachian community because he was gay now has AIDS and decides to come home. Each member of his family has to come to terms with how welcoming to be.
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job
By Kikuko Tsumura
Bloomsbury, 2015
The young Japanese woman who is the main character in this novel moves from job to job, each more dehumanizing and meaningless than the last. And yet, even these absurd assignments cannot drum out of her and her coworkers the desire to do a good job and have work with a purpose.
Nonfiction
Course of the Empire
By Ken Light
Steid, 2021
A masterful black-and-white photographer traveled to U.S. communities, large and small, rich and poor, to document social disintegration and injustice stemming from racism and profiteering by the rich.
El Golpe: U.S. Labor, The CIA, and the Coup at Ford in Mexico
By Rob McKenzie with Patrick Dunne
Pluto, 2022
Co-author Rob McKenzie was working at a Ford assembly plant in Minnesota when he heard that workers at a Ford plant in Mexico had been shot on the shop floor, one of them fatally. The workers were organizing to control their own union in place of corrupt union leaders allied with the Mexican government. This book is the product of McKenzie’s years-long effort to obtain documents about who hired the gunmen and let them into the plant. It also tells a true story of cross-border worker solidarity. (These events are also the subject of 19-min documentary film called “$4 a Day? No Way!” available free on YouTube.)
Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action
By Ray Dorsey, Todd Sherer, Michael Okun, and Bastiaan Bloem
Public Affairs, 2020
In a highly readable book that will be of interest even to people who do not have family members with Parkinson’s, four medical researchers ask why Parkinson’s is growing faster than any other neurological disorder, including Alzheimer’s. They cite scientific studies showing that the disease is linked to exposure to specific pesticides as well as solvents in well water and lay out an action plan for keeping the number of cases from doubling again in the next two decades.
Madstone: The True Tale of World War I Conscientious Objectors Alfred and Charlie Fattig and Their Oregon Wilderness Hideout
By Paul Fattig
Hellgate, 2017
When the United States established a draft for World War I, two brothers in Southern Oregon who did not believe in the war hid out for three years in remote mountain terrain. Their nephew, a veteran journalist with a knack for storytelling, explores what it was like for them to go against the social and political pressures of the time.
Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Beacon, 2021
This historian takes issue with a narrative commonly put forward by politicians who describe American history as a continual process of immigrants (from all over the world) finding freedom and prosperity in their new homeland. That narrative certainly does not describe the experience of Indigenous people or African-Americans, she says. In addition, many immigrant groups, including Latinx people, Asian-Americans, and poor people from Ireland and Italy were met not with open arms but with discrimination and exploitation.
Sidelined
By Julie DiCaro
Dutton, 2021
With some frequency, contemporary reporting on sexism in the sports industry surfaces after a particularly outrageous case of rape or domestic violence comes to light, and then mostly fades from the public eye. A former sports broadcaster shows that men rarely face consequences for discrimination and harassment of women athletes or female sports journalists.
Soul Full of Coal Dust
By Chris Hamby
Little Brown, 2020
Although conservative politicians claim to be great friends of the coal industry, thousands of miners continue to be needlessly exposed to deadly coal dust that causes a slow and painful death from black lung disease. Activist miners and allies who continue to fight for prevention and compensation are up against politically powerful corporations who pay wealthy lawyers and doctors to shield them from responsibility.
The Caring Class: Home Health Aides in Crisis
By Richard Schweid
ILR Press, 2021
More than two million people work each day as home health aides, helping seniors and people with disabilities to stay in their homes. Nearly all are paid poverty wages, often while generating substantial profits for financial speculators. This does not count the millions of people who are not paid but somehow fit caring for a loved one into their already stressful schedules. Schweid focuses on the experience of a large home health aide cooperative in South Bronx that is trying to make improvements for both aides and clients.
The Chinese Must Go
By Beth Lew-Williams
Harvard University Press, 2018
After Chinese workers provided much of the labor to “settle” the West, a violent movement that aimed to expel and exclude them from particular communities and from the United States in general laid the groundwork for anti-immigrant policies that continue to this day.
The Water Defenders
By Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
Beacon, 2021
When a global mining company threatened the water supply that communities in El Salvador depended on, a coalition of local and international allies won unexpected and precedent-setting victories to stop it. This account describes the successful campaign and draws lessons for others fighting to prioritize human needs over corporate greed.
Films
Bone Cage
Afro Viking Pictures, 2020
In this brilliantly acted feature film, the last forest in a Nova Scotia logging community is being clearcut, and young people are out of options.
Colin in Black and White
Netflix, 2021
Colin Kaepernick was raised as the adopted biracial son of white parents—a corporate executive and a nurse—in a California suburb. This six-part series directed by Ava DuVernay focuses on Kaepernick’s teen years to show how class privilege did not prevent him from being subject to racial discrimination, especially as he tried to realize his dream of becoming a major college quarterback as a step toward a career in pro football.
Hive
Zeitgeist Films, 2021
This feature film is based on the actual experience of women whose husbands were disappeared during the war in Kosovo. Fifty widows came together, over fierce patriarchal opposition in their community, to support themselves by forming a cooperative food business.
How They Got Over
First Run Features, 2017
Black gospel groups in the 1930s and 1940s overcame racism to pave the way for rock and roll and rhythm and blues.
On This Side of the World (A este lado del mundo)
Vimeo, 2020
The main character in this feature film, an engineer in Spain, is sent by his company to the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa. His assignment is to help strengthen giant walls designed to keep immigrants from entering Spanish territory and thus gaining access to Europe. In a matter of days, he is forced to confront the realities of migration that have never been his concern.
Orchestrating Change
Bullfrog Films, 2021
A world-class conductor whose career was derailed by mental illness decided to start an orchestra made up of others with similar conditions. They now perform at concert halls, prisons, and youth facilities and are helping to start similar orchestras in multiple cities.
