Douglas Allen

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Georgia

Creative Nonviolence and Sustainability

Douglas Allen argues that Gandhi offers to us the most profound and influential theory, philosophy, and engaged practices of ahimsa or nonviolence. Embracing Gandhi's insightful critiques of modernity, the book sees his approach as a creative and challenging catalyst to rethink our positions today. We live in a post-9/11 world that is defined by widespread physical, psychological, economic, political, cultural, religious, technological, and environmental violence and that is increasingly unsustainable. The author's central claim is Gandhi, when selectively appropriated and creatively reformulated and applied, is essential for formulating new positions that are more nonviolent and more sustainable. These provide resources and hope for dealing with our contemporary crises. The author analyzes what a Gandhi-informed, valuable but humanly limited swaraj technology looks like and what a Gandhi-informed, more egalitarian, interconnected, bottom-up, decentralized world of globalization looks like. The book focuses on key themes in Gandhi's thought, such as violence and nonviolence, Absolute Truth and relative truth, ethical and spiritual living. Challenging us to consider nonviolent, moral, and truthful transformative alternatives today, the author moves through essays on Gandhi in the age of technology; Gandhi after 9/11 and 26/11 terrorism; Gandhi's controversial views on the Bhagavad-Gita and Hind Swaraj; Gandhi and Vedanta; Gandhi on socialism; Gandhi and marginality, caste, class, race, and oppressed others.

Gandhi After 9/11

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Eli Saslow

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, the powerful story of how a prominent white supremacist changed his heart and mind. This is a book to help us understand the American moment and to help us better understand one another.

"The story of Derek Black is the human being at his gutsy, self-reflecting, revolutionary best, told by one of America's best storytellers at his very best. Rising Out of Hatred proclaims if the successor to the white nationalist movement can forsake his ideological upbringing, can rebirth himself in antiracism, then we can too no matter the personal cost. This book is an inspiration."
--Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Derek Black grew up at the epicenter of white nationalism. His father founded Stormfront, the largest racist community on the Internet. His godfather, David Duke, was a KKK Grand Wizard. By the time Derek turned nineteen, he had become an elected politician with his own daily radio show--already regarded as the "the leading light" of the burgeoning white nationalist movement. "We can infiltrate," Derek once told a crowd of white nationalists. "We can take the country back."

Then he went to college. At New College of Florida, he continued to broadcast his radio show in secret each morning, living a double life until a classmate uncovered his identity and sent an email to the entire school. "Derek Black ... white supremacist, radio host ... New College student???" The ensuing uproar overtook one of the most liberal colleges in the country. Some students protested Derek's presence on campus, forcing him to reconcile for the first time with the ugliness of his beliefs. Other students found the courage to reach out to him, including an Orthodox Jew who invited Derek to attend weekly Shabbat dinners. It was because of those dinners--and the wide-ranging relationships formed at that table--that Derek started to question the science, history, and prejudices behind his worldview. As white nationalism infiltrated the political mainstream, Derek decided to confront the damage he had done.

Rising Out of Hatred tells the story of how white-supremacist ideas migrated from the far-right fringe to the White House through the intensely personal saga of one man who eventually disavowed everything he was taught to believe, at tremendous personal cost. With great empathy and narrative verve, Eli Saslow asks what Derek Black's story can tell us about America's increasingly divided nature.

Rising Out of Hatred

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Paul Tough

Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America

New York Times bestselling author Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes is "one of the best books ever written about how poverty influences learning, and vice versa" (The Washington Post).



What would it take?



That was the question that Geoffrey Canada found himself asking. What would it take to change the lives of poor children -- not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives -- their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.



Whatever It Takes is a tour de force of reporting, an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds. Carefully researched and deeply affecting, this is a dispatch from inside the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.

Whatever It Takes

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Michele Foster

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

An oral history of black teachers that gives "valuable insight into a profession that for African Americans was second only to preaching" (Booklist).

Black Teachers on Teaching

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Beverly Daniel Tatum

And Other Conversations about Race

The classic, bestselling book on the psychology of racism-now fully revised and updated Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious. This fully revised edition is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of race in America. "An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life."-Jonathan Kozol

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

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Carol Anderson

The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide

From the Civil War to our combustible present, and now with a new epilogue about the 2016 presidential election, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race. White Rage chronicles the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as "black rage," historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she writes, "everyone had ignored the kindling." Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

White Rage

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bell hooks

Social Studies

Ending Racism

"hooks's books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." --Cornel West
More than two decades before Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement roiled America, bell hooks was declaring that abolishing racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. In Killing Rage, one of our premier cultural and social critics brings the Black feminist's voice to bear on this country's public discourse on race, redressing the historical shunting of women's writing in this sphere to the side. In incisive essays, hooks addresses the wide spectrum of topics dealing with race and racism in the United States: friendship between Black women and white women; psychological trauma among African Americans; and internalized racism in movies and the media. hooks tackles the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it, sharing a vision where "killing rage"--the fierce anger of Black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism--offers not only a wellspring of love and strength, but also a realistic catalyst for positive change.
This seminal book is one Americans need today if we're to remain united tomorrow.
"An angry book that pulls no punches.... Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America." --The New York Review of Books

Killing Rage

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Christian Picciolini

Confronting the New Culture of Extremism

From a onetime white-supremacist leader now working to disengage people from extremist movements, Breaking Hate is a "riveting" (James Clapper), "groundbreaking" (Malcolm Nance), "horrifying [but] hopeful" (S.E. Cupp) exploration of how to heal a nation reeling from hate and violence.

Today's extremist violence surges into our lives from what seems like every direction -- vehicles hurtling down city sidewalks; cyber-threats levied against political leaders and backed up with violence; automatic weapons unleashed on mall shoppers, students, and the faithful in houses of worship. As varied as the violent acts are the attackers themselves -- neo-Nazis, white nationalists, the alt-right, InCels, and Islamist jihadists, to name just a few. In a world where hate has united communities that traffic in radical doctrines and rationalize their use of violence to rally the disaffected, the fear of losing a loved one to extremism or falling victim to terrorism has become almost universal.

Told with startling honesty and intimacy, Breaking Hate is both the inside story of how extremists lure the unwitting to their causes and a guide for how everyday Americans can win them-and our civil democracy-back. Former extremist Christian Picciolini unravels this sobering narrative from the frontlines, where he has worked for two decades as a peace advocate and "hate breaker." He draws from the firsthand experiences of extremists he has helped to disengage, revealing how violent movements target the vulnerable and exploit their essential human desires, and how the right interventions can save lives.

Along the way, Picciolini solves the puzzle of why extremism has come to define our era, laying bare the ways in which modern society-from "fake news" and social media propaganda to coded language and a White House that inflames rather than heals-has polarized and radicalized an entire generation.

Piercing, empathetic, and unrestrained, Breaking Hate tells the sweeping story of the challenge of our time and provides a roadmap to overcoming it.

Breaking Hate

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Matthew B. Crawford

An Inquiry into the Value of Work

A philosopher and mechanic extolls the virtues of manual labor, describing how the satisfactions and challenges of creating with one's own hands promotes a sense of connection to life that office work suppresses.

Shop Class As Soulcraft

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