The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be ...

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

by Layla F. Saad

When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, ...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

From Harvard sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the way we look at poverty in America. In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmon...

Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough

by Pawan Dhingra

Beyond soccer leagues, music camps, and drama lessons, today's youth are in an education arms race that begins in elementary school. In Hyper Education, Pawan Dhingra uncovers the growing world of high-achievement education and th...

The Space Between Us

by Thrity Umrigar 

Set in modern-day India, this evocative novel follows upper-middle-class Parsi housewife Sera Dubash and 65-year-old illiterate household worker Bhima as they make their way through life. Though separated by their stations in l...

Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Reviewed by Linda:

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, this novel follows three generations of an African American family in Mississippi over the course of a few days. Ward, a two-time winner of the NBA, writes powerfully of how p...

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

An urgent exploration of men's entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl, which Rebecca Traister called "jaw-droppingly brilliant." In this bold and stylish critique, C...

Love Anthony

by Lisa Genova

Two women meet by accident on a Nantucket beach and are drawn into a friendship. Olivia is a young mother whose eight-year-old severely autistic son has recently died. She comes to the island in a trial separation to try and make sense of th...

Heavy: An American Memoir

by Kiese Laymon

Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about the physical manifestations of violence, grief, trauma, and abuse on his own body. He writes of his own eating disorder and gambling addiction as well as similar issues that run throughout his fam...

Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in ...

This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto

by Suketu Mehta

There are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and rancor these days than immigration. In This Land is Our Land, the renowned author Suketu Mehta offers a reality-based polemic that vitally clarifies the debate. Drawing...

Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

Reviewed by Linda:Winner of the 2020 Booker Prize and a National Book Award finalist, this beautiful and heart-breaking novel is about a boy growing up in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Shuggie adores his alcoholic mother, ...

Girl, Woman, Other

by Bernardine Evaristo

The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades...

I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

by Austin Channing Brown

The author's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when her parents told her they named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. She grew up in majority-white schools...

Stones from the River

by Ursula Hegi

A dwarf becomes the librarian of a small German town. The work makes her privy to many of the town's secrets and she uses them to set people against each other. It's her way of paying them back for the taunts and humiliatio...

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

by Lindy West

A series of essays by the American writer and comedian, dealing with issues of body image, popular culture, feminism, and social justice.

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism

by Robin DiAngelo

A sociologist probes the reasons that white Americans resist confronting racism.

A Mind Unraveled

by Kurt Eichenwald

The compelling story of an acclaimed journalist and New York Times bestselling author's ongoing struggle with epilepsy — his torturous decision to keep his condition a secret to avoid discrimination, and his ensuing de...

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America a...

Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement

by Albert Woodfox

Nearly forty years in solitary confinement in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell for 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit, Albert Woodfox survived and emerged with his humanity and sense of hope for the future intact.

You’ll Like It Here: The Story of Donald Viktus

by Ed Orzechowski

Abandoned by his unwed mother during World War II, Donald Vitkus becomes a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is 27 days old. Six years later as 'Patient #3394,' he is committed to Belchertown State School, where he is labeled ...

The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

by Tommy Tomlinson

A searing, honest, and candid exploration of what it's like to live as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who decided he had to change his life as he neared the age of fifty weighing in at 460 pounds.

The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women — black and white, mo...

Becoming

by Michelle Obama

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive Whit...

Call Me American: A Memoir

by Abdi Nor Iftin

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines lan...

Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected.

There There

by Tommy Orange

Reviewed by Janet:

This powerful novel begins as a series of loosely connected short stories, but turns into something so much more in this exploration of the plight of the urban Native American. Each of the characters follows their own path...

If a Tree Falls: A Family’s Quest to Hear and Be Heard

by Jennifer Rosner

This revelatory memoir explores family, silence, and what it means to be heard. When her daughters are born deaf, Rosner is stunned. Then she discovers a hidden history of deafness in her family, going back generations to the Jewish encl...

So You Want to Talk about Race

by Ijeoma Oluo

A current, constructive, and actionable exploration of today's racial landscape, offering straightforward clarity that readers of all races need to contribute to the dismantling of the racial divide.

Chasing Space: An Astronaut's Story of Grit, Grace, and Second Chances

by Leland Melvin

A memoir by the former NASA astronaut and NFL wide receiver traces his personal journey from the gridiron to the stars, examining the intersecting roles of community, perseverance, and grace that create opportunities for success.

Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey

by Stephen Kuusisto

A blind poet describes his relationship with his first guide dog and how it changed his life and gave him a newfound appreciation for travel and independence.

The Hate U Give

by Angie Thomas

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of he...

The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life

by Lauren Markham

The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California — fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. Growing up in rural El Salvador in the wake of the civil war,...

Make Trouble

by Cecile Richards

From the president of Planned Parenthood, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, and featured speaker at the Women's March on Washington, comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for wome...

When They Call You a Terrorist

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele

A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while ...

News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an elderly widower and itinerant news reader, is offered fifty dollars to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, from Wichita Falls back to her ...

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

by J.D. Vance

Provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction i...

I am Malala

by Malala Yousafzai

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the u...

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

by Trevor Noah

Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggl...

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

Reviewed by Janet:

Half-sisters Effia and Esi were born in different villages in 18th century Ghana, and they never know each other. Alternating chapters trace the generations of Effia’s descendants in Ghana and Esi’s in the...

The Book of Joy

by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Two leading spiritual masters share their wisdom about living with joy even in the face of adversity, sharing personal stories and teachings about the science of profound happiness and the daily pr...

The Lovers: Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet

by Rod Nordland

An astonishingly powerful and profoundly moving story of a young couple willing to risk everything for love that puts a human face on the ongoing debate about women's rights in the Muslim world. Zakia and Ali were from different tribes, but...

This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like his brothers. One day ...

The Windfall

by Diksha Basu

Moving to a wealthy community after the lucrative sale of their website, Mr. And Mrs. Jha, formerly of East Delhi, struggle with cultural changes while their son, studying in America, pursues romance and wonders how his parents' new status w...

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild 

Reviewed by Linda:

A renowned sociologist from Berkeley spends months getting to know conservatives in Louisiana bayou country. She wants to understand the feelings that drive their politics, the “deep story&a...

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

A cultural history of Wonder Woman traces the character's creation and enduring popularity, drawing on interviews and archival research to reveal the pivotal role of feminism in shaping her seven-decade story. This book examines the life of ...

And the Mountains Echoed

by Khaled Hosseini

Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters....

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

When Janie Starks returns to her rural Florida home, her small black community is overwhelmed with curiosity about her relationship with a younger man.

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

by Felicia Day

From the online entertainment pioneer, actress, and "queen of the geeks" Felicia Day, comes a funny, quirky, and inspiring memoir about her unusual upbringing, her rise to internet stardom, and embracing her weirdness to find her p...

Just Mercy

by Bryan Stevenson

The executive director of a social advocacy group for prisoners tells the story of Walter McMillian, a man condemned to death row for a murder he didn't commit — and explains why justice and mercy must go hand-in-hand.

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance-tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

by John Elder Robison

Shocked by the teenage violence she witnessed during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Erin Gruwell became a teacher at a high school rampant with hostility and racial intolerance. For many of these students - whose ranks included...

Freedom Writers Diary

by the Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell

Shocked by the teenage violence she witnessed during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Erin Gruwell became a teacher at a high school rampant with hostility and racial intolerance. For many of these students &am...

Mom & Me & Mom

by Maya Angelou

The celebrated author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, an officer in the Merchant Marines and a purveyor of a gambling business and rooming house, relating the events that pro...

All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin ...

Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder returns with the extraordinary true story of Deo, a young man who arrives in America from Burundi in search of a new life. After surviving a civil war and genocide, he ekes out a precarious exi...

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House

by Kate Andersen Brower

America's first families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and hea...

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the indigenous peoples was genocidal and imperialist, designed to crush the original inhabitants.

The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

by Kay Redfield Jamison

The personal story of a manic depressive and a world-renowned authority on the subject describes the onset of the illness during her teenage years and her determined journey through the realm of available treatments.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a black father for his son, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present...

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking

by Susan Cain

A former Wall Street attorney and business coach demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in today's culture, charting the rise of "the extrovert ideal" while sharing anecdotal examples to counsel reader...

On the Move: A Life

by Oliver Sacks

Recounts the author's life and career, sharing his experiences as a neurologist in the early 1960s, his obsession with motorcycles and speed, and finding a long-forgotten illness in the wards of a New York chronic hospital.

Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir

by Alan Cumming

In his unique and engaging voice, the acclaimed actor of stage and screen shares the emotional story of his complicated relationship with his father and the deeply buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine

by Victoria Sweet

This portrait of America's last surviving almshouse describes the author's long-time practice at Laguna Honda Hospital, explaining how its extraordinary patients and low-tech focus on "attentive medicine" transformed her views a...

Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

An American, separated from his fiancee, becomes involved in an intense relationship with a young Italian bartender while in Paris.

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

by Black Elk and John G. Neihardt

Reveals the life of Lakota healer Nicholas Black Elk as he led his tribe's battle against white settlers who threatened their homes and buffalo herds, and describes the victories and tragedies at Little Bighorn and Wounded...

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn

A Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-and-wife team speaks out against the oppression of women in the developing world, sharing example stories about victims and survivors who are working to raise awareness, counter ab...

Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

Born with cerebral palsy, Amy can't walk without a walker, talk without a voice box, or even fully control her facial expressions. Plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder, Matthew is consumed with repeated thoughts, neurotic rituals, an...

How to Be Black

by Baratunde Thurston

An editor at The Onion presents a tongue-in-cheek guide to being black that pokes fun at the so-called experts, purists, and racists who think they know what black people believe, do, stand for, and like.

The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the...

Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation

by Cokie Roberts

Cokie Roberts's number one New York Times bestseller, We Are Our Mothers' Daughters, examined the nature of women's roles throughout history and led USA Today to praise her as a "custodian of time-honored values." Her second best...

Blindsight

directed by Lucy Walker

The gripping true-life adventure of six blind Tibetan teenagers on a climbing expedition up formidable Mount Everest.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

Law professor Alexander argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race. As the United State...

Wonder

R.J. Palacio

Ten-year-old Auggie Pullman, who was born with extreme facial abnormalities and was not expected to survive, goes from being home-schooled to entering fifth grade at a private middle school in Manhattan, which entails enduring the taunting and...

Voices of Our Time

by Studs Terkel

From the 1950s through 1997, Louis "Studs" Terkel, bestselling author of Hard Times, Working, The Great War, Coming of Age, and eight other books, hosted a daily one-hour show on WFMT Radio in Chicago. This nationally syndicated, ...

Limbo

by Alfred Lubrano

In Limbo, award-winning journalist Alfred Lubrano identifies and describes an overlooked cultural phenomenon: the internal conflict within individuals raised in blue-collar homes, now living white-collar lives.

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

Moving Violations

by John Hockenberry

A memoir that is both funny and furious from a nationally known radio and TV reporter who is paralyzed from the chest down.

White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son

by Tim Wise

White Like Me is part memoir, part polemical essay collection. It is a personal examination of the way in which racial privilege shapes the daily lives of white Americans in every realm: employment, education, housing, criminal justice, and els...

Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People

by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald

In this accessible and groundbreaking look at the science of prejudice, Banaji and Greenwald show that prejudice and unconscious biases toward others are a fundamental part of the human psyche.