The End of Hunger? A Great Writer Reviews the Evidence

Humans have been hungry for a long time. The 4,000-year-old tomb of Ankhtifi holds the inscription “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.” The traces of our ancient hunger are left in Paleolithic skeletons: a rough winter or a poor harvest shows…

Black and Blue: The Uses of Anger

1. Nina In 1963, the singer Nina Simone was so angry she wanted to go out and kill somebody. The civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been murdered in June and four months later four little black girls died in the bombing of the Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Nina Simone’s husband and manager…

“The Fire This Time” ed. Jesmyn Ward

There’s a cartoon by Ben Sargent, called “Still Two Americas,” that achieved internet fame a couple of years ago. It has two panels. Both depict boys at their front door, and both boys are are saying, “I’m goin’ out, Mom.” One of the boys is white and the other is black. The white boy’s mother…

“The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse” ed. Marjorie Cohn

“Experience, we are told, is a great teacher. If this is so, then my classroom was a clandestine prison and my teachers, experts in the commission of crimes against humanity.” (Sister Dianna Ortiz, from Preface) Thus begins this harrowing collection of essays on torture, incarceration, and the flouting of human rights by the world’s most…

Shakespeare in the Age of the Tyrant

Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, is a timely tome. As Greenblatt well knows, we’re living in an age of ruthless strongmen. The world’s recent and lamentable swing to the right is embodied by all-powerful authoritarians. Here’s the cast list: Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela) – presiding over an avoidable domestic catastrophe, a post-apocalyptic hellscape…

“Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa” by Lee Wengraf

Here’s a quote from the Berlin Conference of 1885, in which the European powers set out their goals for Africa: “… all the powers bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being.” If an African read that…

“In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” by Christina Sharpe

Part memoir, part thesis, and part lyrical examination of what it means to be black in the 21st century, In The Wake is simply a great, great book. It bridges so many fields – social justice, poetry, fiction, Critical Race Theory, semiotics, semantics – yet retains complete coherence. It is beautiful, ingenious and tragic. In…

New Books on Race in the United States

  Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie (Beacon Press) This book by Black feminist legal scholar, writer, and activist Andrea Ritchie looks at the ways black and indigenous women are affected by racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison…

“Feeling the Unthinkable: Essays on Social Justice” by Donald Gutierrez

If Donald Gutierrez were alive today, what would he think of the USA now? He’d be horrified. And disgusted. Gutierrez, who died in 2013, shortly after this collection was published, was a social conscience. He passionately confronted inequity and government abuses, particularly that of his own country, the United States of America. Here, 48 of…

Twelve New Books with Social Justice Themes

1. Decolonization: A Short History by Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel (Princeton University Press) Decolonization examines the consequences of European, Japanese and American decolonization from World War I to the 1990s. It details the dramatic collapses of long-established imperial regimes, some in peace, others in a torrent of blood, and describes the long shadow cast…

“The End of Imagination” by Arundhati Roy

“Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.” (Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination) Arundhati Roy is a superhero. She wears a sari instead of a cape. She has written one novel – The God of Small Things – and it won the Booker Prize. She is an award-winning screenwriter and an award-declining dissenter. She is…

RIP Tom Hayden 1939-2016

On October 23rd we lost writer/activist/politician Tom Hayden. He’d lived a life of service in the pursuit of social justice. Hayden was one of the original Freedom Riders, journeying to the Deep South in 1961 and getting beaten up for his efforts. The following year, while in jail in Georgia, he drafted the Port Huron…