Abstract
Books
An Unrestored Woman
By Shobha Rao
Flatiron, 2016
Twelve stories share the backdrop of the partition of India and Pakistan as two countries in 1947, triggering traumatic disruption in the lives of millions of people based on their religious and ethnic identity.
A Redder Shade of Green
By Ian Angus
Monthly Review Press, 2017
Those seeking ecological and climate action and those seeking economic justice must work together as we cannot achieve one without the other.
Big Hunger
By Andrew Fisher
MIT Press, 2017
As workers’ buying power has declined, many communities have started food banks, often with corporate partners. But telling the public that donating a can of food will address the problem is misleading. Anti-hunger groups should actively support movements to raise wages, make housing affordable, promote sustainable development in rural areas, and win other gains from corporate special interests and the top on percent.
Creating an Ecological Society
By Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams
Monthly Review Press, 2017
A theoretical work explores how capitalism has caused our ecological and climate crisis, what humans can learn from nature, and what an alternative society might look like.
Culture Jamming
Edited by Marily DeLaure and Mortiz Fink
New York University Press, 2017
A collection of twenty-four articles examines efforts to disrupt corporate consumer culture through hoaxes, parodies, flash mobs, street art, and other tactics.
Edge of Morning and Red Rock Stories
Torrey House Press, 2016
Native voices and thirty-five writers (some of them native as well) talk about the significance of Utah’s red rock wildlands that President Obama designated as Bears Ears National Monument—a modest level of protection that the Trump administration is trying to slash, pending legal challenges.
Good Guy Jake
By Mark Torres
Hard Ball Press, 2017
A bilingual book for young people tells a story to explain how a union grievance procedure can protect workers from unfair treatment.
Great Vision
By Richard March
Hard Ball Press, 2017
For those who like to read history through someone’s personal story, this account follows three generations of the author’s family as they immigrated to the United States from Croatia, helped build the union movement, and got involved in the anti-war and anti-racism movements of the 1960s.
In the Fields of the North
By David Bacon
University of California Press, 2017
With more than three hundred impactful photographs, informative text and captions, and farm workers’ own moving stories, all in both English and Spanish, a journalist shows the work life, living conditions, and culture of immigrants who produce America’s food supply.
Requiem for the American Dream
By Noam Chomsky
Seven Stories, 2017
This resource is focused on how the wealthy have maintained power throughout American history, with useful quotes and excerpts from speeches, documents, and other materials.
Rules for Revolutionaries
By Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Chelsea Green, 2017
Two political consultants for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign say what they learned from the experience about how to use technology to support person-to-person organizing.
The Battle for Veterans’ Healthcare
By Suzanne Gordon
Cornell University Press, 2017
Corporate interests are lobbying Trump and Congress to give them control of the Veterans Health Administration. That would not fix health care problems faced by eight million veterans—problems faced in many other parts of our health care system as well. Instead, it would destroy a service that in certain ways could be a model for national health care reform.
The Firebrand and the First Lady
By Patricia Bell-Scott
Vintage, 2017
Pauli Murray was one of America’s most important civil rights and feminist activists, yet most people have never heard of her. This fascinating account follows her from the 1930s to the 1960s as she challenged North Carolina’s ban on African Americans in its universities, Harvard Law School’s ban on women, sexism in the civil rights movement and the Episcopal Church, and racism in the feminist movement. A particular focus is her long friendship and many frank exchanges with Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Politics of Immigration
By Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson
Monthly Review Press, 2017
This useful guide provides readable answers to the most common questions about immigration policy and potential reforms.
The Talker
By Mary Sojourner
Torrey House Press, 2017
Touching, down-to-earth short stories featuring relationships among working people trying to survive and find human connection in western desert communities.
The Takeover
By Monica R. Gisolfi
University of Georgia Press, 2017
This short book powerfully describes how cotton plantation magnates and others developed today’s southern poultry industry with enormous environmental costs, converting landowners essentially to sharecroppers who assume much of the financial risk, all with massive government subsidies.
The Wedding Portrait
By Innosanto Nagara
Seven Stories/Triangle Square, 2017
A simple book for secondary school students uses examples to explain basic movement terms such as boycott, direct action, civil disobedience, and more.
We Are Data
By John Cheney-Lippold
New York University Press, 2017
A professor of digital studies provides a treatise on the ways big corporations and government agencies use algorithms to monitor and affect individuals’ behavior.
We Were Feminists Once
By Andi Zeisler
Public Affairs, 2017
Corporate advertisers and pop stars are using feminist images and slogans to polish their brands and sell products. This “marketplace feminism” encourages us to focus not on power relations, race, or class but on individual girls who can succeed if they just improve their self-esteem.
Films
Black Canaries
Lanternafilm.com, 2017
A stark nineteen-minute feature evokes the grip coal mining had on the filmmaker’s ancestors, as a man continues each day to enter the mine where his father was crippled and his son rendered blind.
Company Town
FirstRunFeatures.com, 2017
A mostly admirable feature-length documentary gives voice to courageous residents of Crossett, Arkansas who work in and live next to a Georgia-Pacific paper and plywood mill owned by the Koch Brothers. Local people, including children, are suffering high rates of cancer after being exposed to toxic chemicals in the workplace and in their air and water. With company officials refusing to be filmed, the visible villains of the story become the hapless EPA and state officials who clearly are not going to do anything about the problems. Missing from the film is the question of why this level of pollution was tolerated during the supposedly environmentally friendly Obama administration and the Clinton governorship of Arkansas, as well as under Republican rule. The film opens with a prominent credit for executive producers Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, two political operatives who are part of the Clinton family’s inner circle. It also features several talking-head appearances by Van Jones, identified as a “former environmental adviser to President Obama.” As a result, what the local people and their scientific allies have to say will be more easily dismissed as just another partisan attack on Republican funders.
Death by Design
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2017
Big corporations are producing staggering quantities of electronic devices with little regard for what happens to the waste, how workers are treated, how the environment is damaged, or other concerns. From China to Silicon Valley, this film shows that a technological boom guided only by short-term profits is not socially sustainable.
Denial
Bullfrogfilms.com, 2017
Taking advantage of access to the head of a Vermont utility company, who happens to be his father, a young filmmaker started work on this documentary about the transition we need to make to cleaner energy. While making the film, his father announced a personal transition from man to woman. The two stories run parallel.
Hearing Is Believing
HearingIsBelievingFilm.com, 2017
Rachel Flowers lost her eyesight soon after birth. By two years old, she could play Bach fugues by ear. Now a young adult with a ready smile, she is a highly skilled and creative jazz and rock musician who masters virtually any instrument she picks up.
My First Kiss and the People Involved
MyFirstKissMovie.com, 2016
A unique and powerful feature film focuses on Sam, a girl in a residential group home who does not speak and only rarely engages with other people. She starts to connect with a new female caregiver, but then picks up clues suggesting that the caregiver has met a violent end. The visuals and sound both attempt to replicate what Sam sees and hears, creating an intense introduction to her world.
Spettacolo
Spettacolofilm.com, 2017
For fifty years, a small village in Tuscany has put on a new play each summer with townspeople as the actors—usually developing each play through conversation about their own experiences. But as this documentary shows, the tradition is in jeopardy as young people leave the area or pursue other interests. At the same time, gentrification driven by city dwellers wanting summer homes divides the town.
The Light of the Moon
TheLightofTheMoonFilm.com, 2017
An honest and nuanced feature film starring Stephanie Beatriz reveals the complex impact of a street rape on a young Latina architect and her psychological health, career, and relationship with her long-term boyfriend.
Whose Streets?
WhoseStreets.com, 2017
This film about the events in Ferguson, Missouri that followed the police killing of Michael Brown is not a typical documentary with narration to provide facts and context or with talking-head professors telling what they think it all means. Instead, it is a call to action that concentrates on giving voice to young black activists who emerged to lead the protest movement, combined with on-the-scene footage of clashes between police and local residents.