Abstract
Books
Fiction
This controversial crime novel was written by a white lawyer who worked as a prosecutor early in his career and now is a defense attorney for people wrongly accused of serious offenses. The main character is a white police union staffer whose job is to represent officers accused of wrongdoing. When a Black female officer shoots and kills a Black robbery suspect, the union staffer grapples with questions about truth and justice.
These eleven short stories are unusual both in the choice of characters and in the use of language. They include workers who depend on the local petrochemical industry even as it ruins their future, a long-term care nurse, a dishwasher, a hockey team brawler, high school students overwhelmed by climate change and looking for hope, and parents dealing with the stresses of raising little ones and sustaining their marriages.
A series of fires fueled by climate change have broken out in Montana in this timely whodunit novel, destroying hundreds of houses, many of them belonging to recent wealthy transplants from California. While some are caused by lightning, it becomes clear that the most damaging are the result of arson, and there are many suspects with potential motivation.
In a small Dust Bowl town in Oklahoma in the 1930s, a train derails, killing 15 passengers, and the next night a local resident is strangled to death. Against a backdrop of Depression-era desperation, the sheriff investigates a long list of suspects who have something to hide.
In this complex crime novel, a reporter risks his life to investigate the death of a Massachusetts shipyard worker, with the legacy of African colonies’ struggles for independence from Portugal as the backdrop.
An unusually inventive poetry collection explores the close biological relationship humans share with other living beings.
Nonfiction
A professor of Black Studies argues that Black Lives Matter protests would make more progress by putting more emphasis on the underlying problem of social and economic inequality. Police are deployed to address the symptoms of that inequality, he says, and therefore focusing only on police behavior will not lead to necessary change.
The senator takes on questions such as why so little changes for working people no matter which party is in power, why many Americans expressed their anger by voting for Trump, and what concrete reforms could be adopted to counter the power of billionaires and improve life for the rest of us.
Midwestern dairy farmers depend on workers from Mexico, many of whom are undocumented, at the same time that large agribusinesses are driving many small family dairies out of business. Over two decades, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit called Bridges/Puentes has taken dozens of U.S. farmers to Mexico to get to know the families and communities of the people who work for them. The former editor of The Progressive magazine observed some of these exchanges and gives voice to the farmers, the Mexican families, and activist groups organizing for solutions that would benefit both.
The U.S. appears to be unique in human history in the prevalence of drug sales, the incarceration of people on drug-related charges, and the high rate of mental illness. Americans are about 4 percent of the world’s population but consume about 80 percent of its opioids and are more than six times more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression than people in the rest of the world. This creative and informative history of drugs in the United States, including coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, opioids, cocaine, marijuana, psychedelics, and more, finds that drug sales often are related to stressful work, feelings of powerlessness and isolation, corporate profiteering, and racism, classism, and sexism.
A sociologist spent two years immersed in a mostly white evangelical mega-church in a relatively well-off suburb of Seattle, studying how the church as an institution and its individual members are dealing with an ongoing dilemma. She found that they want to attract wayward young people who associate the church with racism, sexism, and homophobia, but they also want to continue to identify the traditional white family as the norm and avoid action on inequality of wealth and power. One device they use is the concept that they “hate the sin” (including gayness, for example) but “love the sinner” (meaning they are open to everyone else learning to be like them). To avoid looking at structural inequality, Diefendorf says, they teach that if you aren’t succeeding, it is because of your own personal failings. They stress each individual’s personal relationship with Jesus, she says, in contrast to an emphasis on the well being of the whole community and larger society that is the focus of many Black churches and other kinds of religious institutions.
Sterritt weaves together two powerful stories. One follows her own life, from survival on the streets as a homeless indigenous teenager to her current work as a journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The other is the investigative reporting she has done on the disappearance and murders of at least 1,500 indigenous women and girls in Canada.
A psychiatrist who works with incarcerated people with mental illness describes how the U.S. prison system actually makes many inmates less likely to be able to function outside. She also takes a detailed look at Norway’s system that achieves far better results by emphasizing rehabilitation and treatment rather than retribution.
Films
A white Australian teenager whose best friend and soccer teammate is aboriginal has to decide where his loyalties lie when racism in his family and his community rears its ugly head.
A feature film based on the true story of the first inner-city team to win the national high school chess championship features outstanding acting and an honest portrayal of the obstacles the students and their teacher faced.
A group of low-wage supermarket workers are told that the company plans to introduce self-checkout with no provision for saving their jobs. With the support of their working-poor community, they come up with a risky plan of resistance in this fast-paced feature film from France.
Ways that women are impacted by poverty, homophobia, and out-migration to the United States are the focus of this feature film in which three women return to their remote Mixtec village in Oaxaca.
Penelope Cruz leads an all-star cast in this Spanish film about a variety of characters impacted by evictions, exploitation of immigrants, and profiteering by banks and utilities. The supermarket worker played by Cruz becomes part of a community group that tries to block evictions and provide mutual aid in other ways.
A touching and nuanced Finnish feature film follows a trans woman as she searches for love, faces job discrimination, and reaches out to her teenage daughter despite opposition from her bitter ex-wife.
In this feel-good feature film, a young man with Down Syndrome (played by Zack Gottsagen, who himself has Down Syndrome) escapes from an institution where he is housed and by chance connects with two people (played by Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson) who appreciate his strengths and are searching for a new life themselves.
An 88-year-old Argentinian man defies his grown daughters and travels to Poland to search for the man who saved him from the Holocaust.
As climate-fueled drought makes their isolated community unlivable, an old Bolivian couple who herd llamas have to decide whether to cling to the only home they have ever known.
