Books

Essential reading

Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine
Noura Erakat
Justice in the Question of Palestine is often framed as a question of law. Yet none of the Israel-Palestinian conflict’s most vexing challenges have been resolved by judicial intervention. Occupation law has failed to stem Israel’s settlement enterprise. Laws of war have permitted killing and destruction during Israel’s military offensives in the Gaza Strip. The […]
Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World
Michael Lerner
From social theorist and psychotherapist Rabbi Michael Lerner comes a strategy for a new socialism built on love, kindness, and compassion for one another. Revolutionary Love proposes a method to replace what Lerner terms the “capitalist globalization of selfishness” with a globalization of generosity, prophetic empathy, and environmental sanity. Lerner challenges liberal and progressive forces to move […]
Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work
Jenny Brown
When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if […]
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
Eric Foner
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation’s foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that […]
We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Adam Winkler
We the Corporations chronicles the astonishing story of one of the most successful yet least well-known “civil rights movements” in American history. Hardly oppressed like women and minorities, business corporations, too, have fought since the nation’s earliest days to gain equal rights under the Constitution—and today have nearly all the same rights as ordinary people. Exposing […]
Poisoner in Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
Stephen Kinzer
The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer—the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace—including some intended for Fidel Castro and […]
Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now
Jenny Brown
With an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court and several states attempting to outlaw abortion altogether, many activists are on the defensive, hoping to hold on to reproductive rights in a few places and cases. This spirited book shows how feminism can start winning again. Jenny Brown uncovers a century of legal abortion in the […]
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Nick Estes
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century. Water Protectors knew this battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even […]
The Democracy Fix
Caroline Fredrickson
In The Democracy Fix, the president of the American Constitution Society argues for progressives to focus on winning by learning from the Right that policy follows power, not the other way around. Caroline Fredrickson points to judicial elections, state power, election law and other policy areas that change the rules of the game. Fredrickson shows […]
Can the Working Class Change the World?
Michael Yates
Spoiler alert: Michael Yates not only answers his question with a resounding “Yes,” but insists that the working class must change the world. Our very survival as a people and a planet depend on it. What makes this book invaluable, however, is not its grand conclusion but Yates’s clear-eyed, global analysis of capitalism (historically and in […]
The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the “People’s Historian”
Howard Zinn
When the historian Howard Zinn died in early 2010, millions mourned the loss of one of our foremost intellectual and political guides: a historian, activist, and truth-teller who, in the words of Bob Herbert, “peel[ed] back the rosy veneer of much of American history.” Designed to highlight Zinn’s most important writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from […]
A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present
Howard Zinn
This 729-page masterwork by the legendary historian is a must-have for your library and the perfect gift. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States tells America’s story from the point of view of – and in the words of – women, factory workers, […]

x

Top