By a professor of history and African American studies at Yale, this book examines the history of urban rebellions – often called ‘riots’ by official sources – in US cities from the mid-1960s to the present day. Though today we most often remember only the highly publicized uprisings in the largest cities in the mid-to-late …
A collection of writings by Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. He first became known beyond Egypt for his role in the revolution of 2011, but he was active well before that and he comes from a longstanding leftist family – his father had been a political prisoner in his youth and went on to become …
A wide ranging work of nonfiction drawing out the connections between the climate crisis and colonialism. Though I had not previously heard of him, the author is a well-known novelist and essayist, and while this book is intellectually substantive enough to be a work of scholarship, it has very clearly been written by a *writer* …
History. Examines the interconnections between colonialism in the British Empire and slavery in the United States, primarily over the period from the abolition of slavery in the former in the 1830s to its abolition in the latter in the 1860s. At least in part because of how history is so often written in national silos, …
A collection of pieces by organizers and scholars who have been part of the movement in Canada in the last two years to defund the police and work towards police and prison abolition. I interviewed one of the editors and one of the contributors recently, so check that out for more details: https://mediacoop.ca/node/119048. I won’t …
Prehistory. A massive book that looks at what is known and what can be reasonably guessed about the trajectory of human existence in the distant past, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist. It is a bold new synthesis woven in part from straightforward reporting of empirical evidence long-known in specialist circles but rarely disseminated …
A mixture of movement memoir and grounded theorizing about some key areas of reflection and debate in movements. The author is one of the three Black women who initially coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. She was already an experienced organizer at that point, having cut her teeth doing neighbourhood and city-wide organizing in the Bay Area …
A scholarly history of workers in media, publishing, design, advertising, and related professions in New York from the 1930s to the 1970s. Across the decades in which capitalism took on a mass consumerist shape, it traces changes in these industries that were so central in that process. And it examines the ways in which workers …
An anti-productivity book, of sorts. In most books that are either directly or indirectly about how we individually make use of our time, the goal is to enable the reader to do more. Now, I don’t actually often read that sort of book, at least in its most blatant neoliberal-cult-of-productivity manifestation. But I have been …
Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book …