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Angela Davis: Seize the Time (Hirmer) - Oct. 2
By Gerry Beegan (Editor), Donna Gustafson
(Editor)
Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a
courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and
acquittal, the book traces Davis’s life and work during the
subsequent decades and her influential career as a public
intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the
archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches,
videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis’s political
writings. Also features essays on visibility and invisibility,
history, memory, and the iconography of black radical
feminism.
Undrowned (AK Press) - Nov. 17
By Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and
our whole species based on the subversive and transformative
guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer,
fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and
struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our
species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a mix of poetic
sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might
teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for
wondering and questioning.
Big Friendship (Simon & Schuster) - Available Now
By Aminatou Sow, Ann Friedman
A close friendship is one of the most influential and important
relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that!
But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most
people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for
the long haul.
Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story
of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this
honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one
another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your
Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate
conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own
friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.
Caste (Random House) - Available Now
By Isabel Wilkerson
American Studies
They Were Here Property (Harvard Univ. Press)
Available Now
By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African
American history, historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on
a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were
sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and
benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women
typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were
often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women
often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands,
they employed management techniques that were as effective and
brutal as those used by slave-owning men. By examining the
economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning
women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to
rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding
America.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste
system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the
nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and
Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie
caste systems across civilizations, including divine will,
bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about
people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel
Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and
many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow
of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis
studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of
the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that
there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure
themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs
of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this
hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward
to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive
separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common
humanity.