Books and Magazines
Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights | By Erwin Chemerinksy (Nonfiction)
An unprecedented work of civil rights and legal history, Presumed Guilty by Berkeley Law Dean Irwin Chemerinsky reveals how the Supreme Court has enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses through its decisions over the last half-century. In the tradition of Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Presumed Guilty is a necessary intervention into the roiling national debates over racial inequality and reform, creating a history where none was before—and promising to transform our understanding of the systems that enable police brutality.
How the World is Passed - A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | By Clint Smith (Nonfiction)
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. (Little, Brown and Company)
Curb |By Divya Victor (Poetry)
Divya Victor documents how immigrants and Americans navigate the liminal sites of everyday living: lawns, curbs, and sidewalks undergirded by violence but also constantly repaved with new possibilities of belonging. Curb witnesses immigrant survival, familial bonds, and interracial parenting in the context of nationalist and white-supremacist violence against South Asians. The book refutes the binary of the model minority and the monstrous, dark “other” by reclaiming the throbbing, many-tongued, vermillion heart of kith. (nightboat books)
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning | By Kathy Park Hong (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25716898~S1) Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world. (Penguin Random House)
Rolling Warrior: The Incredible, Sometimes Awkward, True Story of a Rebel Girl on Wheels Who Helped Spark a Revolution | By Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner
In this young readers' edition of her acclaimed memoir, Being Heumann, Judy shares her journey of battling for equal access in an unequal world--from fighting to attend grade school after being described as a "fire hazard" because of her wheelchair to suing the New York City school system for denying her a teacher's license because of her disability. (Beacon Press)
The 1619 Project A NEW ORIGIN STORY | Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine (Nonfiction)
This new book substantially expands on the work of the 1619 Project, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. (Penguin Random House)
My Broken Language: A Memoir | By Quiara Alegria Hudes (Memoir)
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. (One World)
On Juneteenth | By Annette Gordon-Reed (Nonfiction)
Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. (W. W. Norton & Company)
The Making of Asian American. A History | By Erika Lee
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25742499~S1) The Making of Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a “despised minority,” Asian Americans are now held up as America’s “model minorities” in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. (Simon & Schuster)
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents | By Isabel Wilkerson (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25718886~S1) In this brilliant book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. (Penguin Random House)
Mediocre. The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America | By Ijeoma Oluo
Through the last 150 years of American history — from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics — Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. (Seal Press)
Our History is the Future: Standing Rock vs. the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the long tradition of Indigenous Resistance | By Nick Estes (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25670451~S1) How two centuries of Indigenous resistance created the movement proclaiming “Water is life”. In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance that led to the #NoDAPL movement. Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a manifesto, and an intergenerational story of resistance. (Penguin Random House)
Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century | By Barbara Ransby (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25681725~S1) Award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of the Black Lives Matter movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. (UC Press)
America for Americans: A History of Xenophia in the United States | By Erika Lee (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25246127~S1) Berkeley alumnae - In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest-growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. (Simon and Schuster)
Mountain Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies | Edited by Russell Jeung, Karen Umemoto, Harvey Dong, Eric Mar, Lisa Hirai Tsuchitani, Arnold Pan (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25088982~S1) This book shares the history of student movements at SF State, UC Berkeley, and UCLA during the 1960s and features oral histories of prior and current student activists. Student activists at these universities envisioned an education that would reflect their histories and prepare them to address the problems they saw in their communities and in society. (UCLA Asian American Studies Center)
From the Land of Shadows War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora | By Khatharya Um (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25818723~S1) Khatharya Um is a Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies - Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies - at UC Berkeley. In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia. (NYU Press)
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said | By Arundhati Roy and John Cusack (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23735989~S1 In late 2014, Arundhati Roy, John Cusack, and Daniel Ellsberg travelled to Moscow to meet with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In these discussions, Roy and Cusack discuss the nature of the state, empire, and surveillance in an era of perpetual war, the meaning of flags and patriotic. (Haymarket Books)
Native Resistance: An Intergenerational Fight For Survival And Life | By LaNada War Jack (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24117214~S1) Berkeley alumnae Dr. War Jack - a member of the Shoshone Bannock Tribes - chronicles the events tied to the genocide of Native people in the United States — from forced removal to federal reservations and her life during the late sixties at UC Berkeley, the Occupation of Alcatraz Island, Pyramid Lake Water War in Nevada, to the Standing Rock Resistance in North Dakota.
The Best We Could Do | An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25626309~S1) Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. (Abrams Books)
Youth, Identity, Power The Chicano Movement | by Carlos Munoz (Non-fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b10247779~S1) Carlos Muñoz places the Chicano Movement in the context of the political and intellectual development of people of Mexican descent in the USA, tracing the emergence of student activists and intellectuals in the 1930s and their initial challenge to the dominant white racial and class ideologies. (Verso Books)
Sight Lines | By Arthur Sze (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24965811~S1) Berkeley alumnus. Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. From the current phenomenon of drawing calligraphy with water in public parks in China to Thomas Jefferson laying out dinosaur bones on the White House floor, from the last sighting of the axolotl to a man who stops building plutonium triggers, Sight Lines moves through space and time and brings the disparate and divergent into stunning and meaningful focus. (Copper Canyon Press)
The Yellow House | By Sarah M. Broom (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25099225~S1) Berkeley alumnae. 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. (Grove Atlantic)
How to Be an Antiracist | By Ibram X. Kendi (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25620794~S1) In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. (Penguin Randomhouse)
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous | By Ocean Vuong (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25183555~S1) At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. (Penguin Random House)
The Other Americans | By Laila Lalami (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25579182~S1) 2019 National Book Awards Longlist: Fiction. A timely and powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant—at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story, informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture.
The Pretty One | By Keah Brown (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25141287~S1) From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America. Keah Brown loves herself, but that hadn’t always been the case. Born with cerebral palsy, her greatest desire used to be normalcy and refuge from the steady stream of self-hate society strengthened inside her. But after years of introspection and reaching out to others in her community, she has reclaimed herself and changed her perspective.
The End of the Myth - From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America | By Greg Grandin (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24932163~S1) 2919 National Book Award Longlist. From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a new and eye-opening interpretation of the meaning of the frontier, from early westward expansion to Trump’s border wall. Ever since this nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolizing a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation—democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America hasa new symbol: the border wall.
Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters | By Rebecca Solnit (Nonfiction)
9http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25182622~S1) Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.
Know My Name - A Memoir |By Chanel Miller
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25183081~S1) She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus. Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words. Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.
The Privileged Poor How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students | By Anthony Abraham Jack (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24871554~S1) The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In The Privileged Poor, Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they’ve arrived on campus. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This bracing and necessary book documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others. (Harvard University Press)
PET | By Akwaeke Emezi (Fiction, Young Adult)
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award. The highly-anticipated, genre-defying new novel by award-winning author Akwaeke Emezi explores themes of identity and justice. Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? Acclaimed novelist Akwaeke Emezi makes their riveting and timely young adult debut with a book that asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America | By ANDRÉS RESÉNDEZ (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23319623~S1) Finalist, National Book Awards 2016 for Nonfiction. Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. Reséndez builds the incisive case that it was mass slavery—more than epidemics—that decimated Indian populations across North America. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The 1619 Project | New York Times Magazine
The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
SOLITARY: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope |By Albert Woodfox with Leslie George (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25613514~S1) 2019 National Book Award Longlist. Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert Woodfox turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds. (Grove Atlantic)
Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law | By Haben Girma (Memoir)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25756519~S1) The incredible life story of Haben Girma, the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School, and her amazing journey from isolation to the world stage. Haben defines disability as an opportunity for innovation. She learned non-visual techniques for everything from dancing salsa to handling an electric saw. She developed a text-to-braille communication system that created an exciting new way to connect with people. Haben pioneered her way through obstacles, graduated from Harvard Law, and now uses her talents to advocate for people with disabilities. (Twelve Books)
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States | By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25767025~S1) Acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted the expansion of the US empire. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. (Penguin Random House)
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke | By Jeffrey C. Stewart (Biography)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24201825~S1) Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. (Pulitzer Prize website)
Native Country of the Heart - A Memoir | By Cherrie Moraga
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24957006~S1) Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. (Macmillian)
Good Talk - A Memoir in Conversation | By Mira Jacob (Memoir)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24965738~S1) A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. (Penguin Random House)
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | By David W. Blight (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24730719~S1) Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize - History. In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. (Simon & Schuster)
Algorithms of Oppression - How search engines reinforce racism | By Safiya Umoja Noble (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24927036~S1) In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. (NYU Press)
Good Kids. Bad City - A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America | By Kyle Swenson (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24891231~S1) Award-winning investigative journalist Kyle Swenson, Good Kids, Bad City is the true story of the longest wrongful imprisonment in the United States to end in exoneration, and a critical social and political history of Cleveland, the city that convicted them. (Macmillan Publishers)
Autism in Heels - The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum| By Jennifer Cook O'Toole (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25818293~S1) At the age of thirty-five, Jennifer was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, and for the first time in her life, things made sense. Now, Jennifer exposes the constant struggle between carefully crafted persona and authentic existence, editing the autism script with wit, candor, passion, and power. Her journey is one of reverse-self-discovery not only as an Aspie but—more importantly—as a thoroughly modern woman. (Skyhorse Publishing)
The Color of Success Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority | By Ellen D. Wu (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23670138~S1) The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. (Princeton University Press)
Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management | By Caitlyn Rosenthal (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25546550~S1) Accounting for Slavery is a unique contribution to the decades-long effort to understand New World slavery’s complex relationship with capitalism. Through careful analysis of plantation records, Assistant Professor of History at UC Bekeley Caitlin Rosenthal explores the development of quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations. She shows how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizational structures and even practiced an early form of scientific management.
The House of Broken Angels | By Luis Alberto Urrea (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24268606~S1) The quintessential story of what it means to be the first generation to live two lives across one border, The House of Broken Angels is Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea’s unforgettable portrait of the De La Cruz family as they celebrate the lives of two of their most beloved members over the course of one raucous and bittersweet weekend. (Little, Brown and Company)
Heavy - An American Memoir | By Kiese Laymon (NonFiction)
((http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25719005~S1) In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. (Schribner
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to Present | By David Treuer (Ojibwe) Nonfiction
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24833901~S1) 2019 National Book Award Longlist, Nonfiction. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Beginning with the tribes' devastating loss of land and the forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools, he shows how the period of greatest adversity also helped to incubate a unifying Native identity.
Eye Level | By Jenny Xie (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24294589~S1) Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection. Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. (Graywolf Press)
Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI | By Dean Rader (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b18513694~S1) Profusely illustrated with more than one hundred images, this is the first book that focuses on how Native Americans have used artistic expression to both engage with and resist Anglo culture while asserting deeply held ethical values. (University of Texas Press)
Olio | By Tyehimba Jess (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23591724~S1) Winner of the 2017 Pultizer Prize for Poetry. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
This Muslim American Life Dispatches from the War on Terror | By Moustafa Bayoumi (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23125585~S1) In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present. (NYU Press)
The Line Becomes a River - Dispatches From the Border | By Francisco Cantú (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24199740~S1) For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger, and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line. (Penguin Random House)
The Souls of Black Folk | By W.E.B. Du Bois (NonFiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25675844~S1) First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
The Round House | By Louise Erdrich (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b20386495~S1) The Round House won the National Book Award for fiction. Transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, this exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. (Harper Colins Publisher)
Notes from No Man's Land | By Eula Biss (Essays)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b17621408~S1) Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. (Graywolf Press)
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" | By Zora Neale Hurston (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24158893~S1) A newly published (2018) work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the U.S. (Harper Collins).
Thank You for Your Service | By David Finkel (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b20770690~S) Finkel tells the story of the men of 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they reintegrate "as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large."
There There | By Tommy Orange (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25184543~S1) Winner of the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award. Jacquie Red Feather and her sister Opal grew up together, relying on each other during their unsettled childhood. As adults they were driven apart, but Jacquie is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. That’s why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle's death. Edwin is looking for his true father. Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance. All of them are connected by bonds they may not yet understand. (Penguin Books)
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen | By Jose Antonio Vargas (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24653593~S1) This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about constantly hiding from the government and, in the process, hiding from ourselves. This book is about what it means to not have a home.
So You Want to Talk About Race | By Ijeoma Oluo (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24199019~S1) In So You Want to Talk About Race, Editor at Large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the “N” word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don’t dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans. (Seal Press)
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Time of Colorblindness | By Michelle Alexander (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25430036~S1) Michelle ALexander's stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement.
We Gon Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation | By Jeff Chang (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23522954~S1) Jeff Chang looks at the recent tragedies and widespread protests that have shaken the country. He explores the rise and fall of the idea of “diversity”, the roots of student protest, changing ideas about Asian Americanness, and the impact of a century of racial separation in housing.
Whereas | By Layli Long Soldier (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23872234~S1) Finalist 2017 National Book Award. “The Whereas Statements lay bare the realities and contrasts of Long Soldier’s life and her role as an Oglala Lakota poet, mother, and daughter. There are moments of beautiful intimacy, connection, and forgiveness; there is also an awareness of separation, and acknowledgment of the difficulty (sometimes, impossibility) of repair.”—The Atlantic
Racing to Justice | By john a. powell (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24039863~S1) Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future.
The Common Good | By Robert B. Reich (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25688432~S1) the warmth and lucidity that have made him one of our most important public voices, UC Berkeley professor Robert B. Reich makes the case for a generous, inclusive understanding of the American project, centering on the moral obligations of citizenship. Rooting his argument in everyday reality and common sense, Reich demonstrates the existence of a common good, and argues that it is this that defines a society or a nation.
American Hate: Survivors Speak Out | by Arjun Singh Sethi (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24664035~S1) In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities. You will hear from immigrants and refugees weighing whether to stay in this country, from parents grappling with how to explain the surge in hostility to their children, and from families mourning the loss of a loved one.
Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color | Edited by Christopher Soto
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24614022~S1) A survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Locking Up Your Own | By James Forman, Jr. (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24200469~S1) In recent years, America’s criminal justice system has become the subject of an increasingly urgent debate. Critics have assailed the rise of mass incarceration, emphasizing its disproportionate impact on people of color. As James Forman, Jr., points out, however, the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand why. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Two Countries: US Daughters & Sons of Immigrant Parents | By Tina Schumann (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24160183~S1) An anthology of flash memoir, personal essays, and poetry edited by the adult child of an immigrant born and raised in the United States. The collection contains contributions from sixty-five writers who were either born and/or raised in the United States by one or more immigrant parent. (Red Hen Press)
Trans* A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability | By Jack Halberstam (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25546300~S1) In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future. (UC Press)
The Land of Open Graves | by Jason De Leon (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23105577~S1) Anthropologist Jason De León sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time—the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.
An African American and Latinx History of the United States | By Paul Ortiz (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24208908~S1) Spanning more than two hundred years, this much-anticipated book is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like “manifest destiny” and “Jacksonian democracy,” and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. (Beacon Press)
Stand Up! How to Get Involved, Speak Out, and Win in a World on Fire | By Gordon Whitman (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24202706~S1) This book is for those frustrated by what they see happening in the world but not sure what they can do about it. Veteran organizer Gordon Whitman shows that we have the power we need to create a racially and economically just society. But it won't happen if we stay on the sidelines sharing social media posts and signing online petitions. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers)
Between the World and Me | By Ta-Nehisi Coates (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25406182~S1) In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. National Book Award Winner 2015.
The Color of Law - The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America | By Richard Rothstein (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23875380~S1) Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods.
Citizens But Not Americans: Race and Belonging Among Latino Millennials | By Nilda Flores-Gonzalez (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24129980~S1) The book examines how Latino millennials understand race, experience race, and develop notions of belonging. Based on nearly one hundred interviews, the author argues that though these young Latina/os are U.S. citizens by birth, they do not feel they are part of the “American project,” and are forever at the margins looking in. (NYU Press)
Just Mercy | By Bryant Stevenson (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b23943229~S1) From one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time comes an unforgettable true story about the redeeming potential of mercy. Bryan Stevenson was a gifted young attorney when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and those trapped in the furthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man sentenced to die for a notorious murder he didn't commit. The case drew Stevenson into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship - and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.-- Back cover.
Words That Wound | By Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b15570323~S1) The book succinctly explores a host of issues presented by hate speech, including legal theories for regulating it, the harms it causes, and policy arguments pro and con suppressing it. Particular attention is devoted to hate on the Internet, talk radio, and to the role of white supremacist groups in disseminating it.
The Kids: The Children of LGBTQ Parents in the USA | By Gabriela Herman (Photobook)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24112502~S1) For the past four years, award-winning photographer Gabriela Herman, whose mother came out when Herman was in high school and was married in one of Massachusetts’s first legal same-sex unions, has been photographing and interviewing children and young adults in America with one or more parent who identifies as lesbian, gay, trans, or queer. These parents and children juggled silence and solitude with a need to defend their families on the playground, at church, and at holiday gatherings.
Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event | Trinh T. Minh-ha (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25149289~S1) UC Berkeley Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Rhetoric looks at travel across national borders--as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee — in a pre-and post-9/11 world as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home, and exile.
Sister Outsider | By Audre Lorde (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25057875~S1) Selected by Professor Tina Sacks | Berkeley Social Welfare. "I am particularly drawn to Audre Lorde because she represents the kind of bravery I'm trying to cultivate in my own life and to inspire in my students.She reminds us that we have to speak up and walk boldly into our strengths, individually and collectively. And she also speaks in other essays in the book about engaging in struggle with love. This really resonates with me because so often we get angry at each other for very good reasons and forget that we are all fighting our own individual battles and that being human is hard. We can fight hard and still hold a space for love."
Exit West | By Mohsin Hamid (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25416983~S1) “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a roadmap to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” –Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review
My Beloved World | By Sonia Sottomayor (Autobiography)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b20432017~S1) "The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself."
Waking Up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race | By Debbie Irving (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25040323~S1) "My hope is that by sharing my sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, I offer a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As I unpack my own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, I reveal how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated my ill-conceived ideas about race."
Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty | By Peeter Edelman (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24154487~S1) Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor. (The New Press)
Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer: Undocumented Vignettes from a Pre-American Life | By Alberto Ledesma (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24100500~S1) As a teacher and administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, Ledesma doesn’t fit the stereotypical image of the undocumented immigrant. But that’s the point of this book, which is part graphic memoir and part cri de coeur. This is a powerful document of the unspoken anxieties felt by Americans like him who worry that their immigration status and history will overshadow everything else in their lives. (Publishers Weekley)
The Fire Next Time | By James Baldwin (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b14939348~S1) One of America’s preeminent Black intellectuals, James Baldwin wrote this classic book in part, as a letter to his nephew, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery. It was written just a few years before the Civil Rights movement emerged. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time.”
Coverings : The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights | By Kenji Yoshino (Nonfiction)
((http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b11150191~S1) "To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines."
I Love a Broad Margin to My Life | by Maxine Hong Kingston (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b18335108~S1) Maxine Hong Kingston is a Chinese American author and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. In her singular voice—both humble and brave, touching and humorous—Kingston gives us a poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse that captures the wisdom that comes with age. As she reflects on her sixty-five years, she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage to her arrest at a peace march in Washington. (Penguin Random House Publishing)
Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats and Media Created a New America | By G. Christina Mora (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b21352046~S1) Professor Mora (UC Berkeley, Sociology) uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.
Redefining Realness | By Janet Mock (Autobiography)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25670448~S1) Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population.
The Work-Shy | By the Blunt Research Group (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25670448~S1) Poetic "assemblages" by the anonymous collective The Blunt Research Group, working with testimonies by and about people held in California's first youth prison and two "asylums”: people "at once," as the Group puts it, "denied work and subjected to its punishing routine."
Free Speech | By Irwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman (Non-Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24051075~S1) A university chancellor and a law school dean—both constitutional scholars who teach a course in free speech to undergraduates—argue that campuses must provide supportive learning environments for an increasingly diverse student body but can never restrict the expression of ideas.
Whistling Vivaldi - How stereotypes affect us and what we can do | By Claude Steele (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b20851620~S1). Suggested by VC Oscar Dubon. The acclaimed social psychologist offers an insider’s look at his research and groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity, shedding new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and reshaping American identities.
Wild Beauty | by Ntozake Shange (Poetry)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b24155624~S1) From the poet, novelist, and cultural icon behind the award-winning and celebrated Broadway play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. With a clear, raw, and affecting voice, Shange draws from her experience as a feminist black woman in American to craft groundbreaking poetry about pain, beauty, and color.
The Refugees | By Viet Thanh Nguyen (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25711167~S1) In The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of immigration. (Grove Atlantic)
The Underground Railroad | By Colson Whitehead (Fiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b25183098~S1) Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.
Imperial San Francisco - Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, With a New Preface by Gray Brechin (Nonfiction)
(http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b20835510~S1) First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families—the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others—who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale.