Nonfiction
Julie and Julia : my year of cooking dangerously
Julie Powell
641.509 /Powell
Nonfiction, Cookbooks
Nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell resolved to reclaim her life by cooking, in a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's 1961 classic, Mastering the art of French cooking. Her unexpected reward, a new life lived with gusto.
The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America
Richard Rothstein
973.00496 /Rothstein
Nonfiction
"Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). 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. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past."--Provided by publisher.
Added by Jason
The Rodrigo chronicles : conversations about America and race
Richard Delgado
323.1196 /Delgado
Nonfiction
"In The Rodrigo chronicles, Delgado adopts his trademark storytelling approach that casts aside the dense, dry language so commonly associated with legal writing to offer up a series of incisive and compelling conversations about race in America."--BOOK JACKET. "Rodrigo, a brash and brilliant African-American law graduate, has been living in Italy and has just arrived in the offices of a professor when we meet him. Through the course of the book, the professor and he discuss the American racial scene, touching on such issues as the role of minorities in an age of global markets and competition, the black left, the rise of the black right, black crime, feminism, law reform, and the economics of racial discrimination."--BOOK JACKET. "Expanding on one of the central themes of the critical race movement, namely that the law has an overwhelmingly white voice, Delgado here presents a radical and stunning thesis: it is not black but white crime that poses the most significant problem in modern American life."--Jacket.
Added by Jason
The law unbound! A Richard Delgado reader
Richard Delgado
340.115/Delgado
Nonfiction
"Collects the best of Delgado's work. We have identified his most foundational and easily accessible essays and grouped them under eight broad themes. We have edited them to eliminate overlapping material and most footnotes. The reader seeking an unabridged version should consult the acknowledgments, which identifies where they may be found"--Introduction, page x.
Added by Jason
Faces at the bottom of the well : the permanence of racism
Derrick Bell
305.8 /Bell
Nonfiction
The classic work on American racism and the struggle for racial justice In Faces at the Bottom of the Well, civil rights activist and legal scholar Derrick Bell uses allegory and historical example to argue that racism is an integral and permanent part of American society. African American struggles for equality are doomed to fail so long as the majority of whites do not see their own well-being threatened by the status quo. Bell calls on African Americans to face up to this unhappy truth and abandon a misplaced faith in inevitable progress. Only then will blacks, and those whites who join with them, be in a position to create viable strategies to alleviate the burdens of racism. "Freed of the stifling rigidity of relying unthinkingly on the slogan 'we shall overcome,'" he writes, "we are impelled both to live each day more fully and to examine critically the actual effectiveness of traditional civil rights remedies." With a new foreword by Michelle Alexander, Faces at the Bottom of the Well is urgent and essential reading on the problem of racism in America.
Added by Jason
And we are not saved : the elusive quest for racial justice ; with a new appendix for classroom discussion
Derrick Bell
305.896 /Bell
Nonfiction
A distinguished legal scholar and civil rights activist employs a series of dramatic fables and dialogues to probe the foundations of America's racial attitudes and raise disturbing questions about the nature of our society.
Added by Jason
The 1619 Project : a new origin story
973.00496/Sixteen
Nonfiction
"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country's very origin. The 1619 Project tells this new origin story, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country. Orchestrated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by MacArthur "genius" and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this collection of essays and historical vignettes includes some of the most outstanding journalists, thinkers, and scholars of American history and culture--including Linda Villarosa, Jamelle Bouie, Jeneen Interlandi, Matthew Desmond, Wesley Morris, and Bryan Stevenson. Together, their work shows how the tendrils of 1619--of slavery and resistance to slavery--reach into every part of our contemporary culutre, from voting, housing and healthcare, to the way we sing and dance, the way we tell stories, and the way we worship. Interstitial works of flash fiction and poetry bring the history to life through the imaginative interpretations of some of our greatest writers. The 1619 Project ultimately sends a very strong message: We must have a clear vision of this history if we are to understand our present dilemmas. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and trying as hard as we can to undersand its powerful influence on our present, can we prepare ourselves for a more just future"--
Added by Jason
Vanguard : how Black women broke barriers, won the vote, and insisted on equality for all
Martha S. Jones
324.62 /Jones
Nonfiction
"According to conventional wisdom, American women's campaign for the vote began with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The movement was led by storied figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But this women's movement was an overwhelmingly white one, and it secured the constitutional right to vote for white women, not for all women. In Vanguard, acclaimed historian Martha Jones offers a sweeping history of African American women's political lives in America, recounting how they fought for, won, and used the right to the ballot and how they fought against both racism and sexism. From 1830s Boston to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and beyond to Shirley Chisholm, Stacey Abrams, and Kamala Harris, Jones excavates the lives and work of Black women who, although in many cases suffragists, were never single-issue activists. She recounts the lives of Maria Stewart, the first American woman to speak about politics before a mixed audience of men and women; African Methodist Episcopal preacher Jarena Lee; Reconstruction-era advocate for female suffrage Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Boston abolitionist, religious leader, and women's club organizer Eliza Ann Gardner; and other hidden figures who were pioneers for both gender and racial equality. Revealing the ways Black women remained independent in their ideas and their organization, Jones shows how Black women were again and again the American vanguard of women's rights, setting the pace in the quest for justice and collective liberation. In the twenty-first century, Black women's power at the polls and in politics is evident. Vanguard reveals that this power is not at all new, but is instead the culmination of two centuries of dramatic struggle"--
Added by Jason
Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
363.51 /Taylor
Nonfiction
"Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers a ... chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure"--
Added by Jason
The color of law : a forgotten history of how our government segregated America
Richard Rothstein
973.00496 /Rothstein
Nonfiction
Added by Jason
This book was the basis of the move "Julie & Julia" directed by Nora Ephron. -Beth