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Book Reviews from World Wide Work bulletin

This is a searchable archive of book reviews that appeared in past editions of the free emailed bulletin, World Wide Work. They appear in chronological order, from most recent to least recent.

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• The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar (OR Books). A short book tells the story of the soldier accused of giving thousands of documents to Wikileaks to expose government lies and law breaking in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It explains why the documents were so revealing, why he might have found it necessary to release them, and the physical torture he has suffered while imprisoned on the Obama administration’s watch.

  Living as Form edited by Nato Thompson (MIT Press). Inspiring text and color photos describe more than a hundred projects that combined elements of art, social engagement, and community building all around the world during the past two decades. Some involved performance art or historical reenactments with a twist. Others involved occupying public spaces. Still others gave normally marginalized people a chance to express and see themselves in a new way. All challenged corporate commercial culture. Warning: this unique and lively book may give you ideas for social art in your own community!

  Crusade 2.0 by John Feffer (City Lights). Islam has replaced communism as the all-purpose enemy whose presence justifies huge increases in U.S. military spending, invasions of other countries, and erosion of civil liberties at home. The author argues that those who oppose Islamophobia must advocate not mere “tolerance” but active, positive engagement on a personal, community, and international level.

  The Operators by Michael Hastings (Blue Rider). A Rolling Stone reporter describes how policy makers’ decisions about the war in Afghanistan that have affected millions of lives have been based on ego, career enhancement, and power struggles. By his account, U.S. generals and Hillary Clinton maneuvered for escalation, Vice President Biden argued for troop withdrawal and assignment of special forces to pursue “less than a hundred” Al-Qaeda operatives, and President Obama, indecisive and looking for a “compromise” that would offend no one, ended up giving the generals nearly everything they wanted.

  Valley of Shadows and Dreams by Ken Light and Melanie Light (Heyday). A beautifully printed book of black-and-white photos and text portrays California’s Central Valley as a place where the greed of agribusiness has destroyed natural resources and created deep inequality.

  So Rich, So Poor by Peter Edelman (The New Press). A lifelong activist who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the gutting of welfare programs asks why poverty rates have steadily grown in America over the past ten years and proposes some solutions.

  Gardening Vertically by Noemie Vialard (W.W. Norton). Step-by-step instructions are provided for 24 ways to create green walls of vegetation, including a foliage wall, mosquito repellent wall, wall of vegetables, herb wall, and many more.

  Blue Ridge Commons by Kathryn Newfont (University of Georgia). This detailed history documents the role of some mountain residents in western North Carolina in opposing wilderness designation of national forests but supporting campaigns to block clear cutting and oil and gas development. The consistent thread was that they wanted to maintain their tradition of hunting and fishing while being able to log in a sustainable way.

  Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power by Amy Sonnie and James Tracy (Melville House). This is a history of organizations in the 1960s that united working class whites for radical change. As part of their mission, they directly challenged racism because it divided working people. At times, they supported radical black groups with whom they had more in common than with white power brokers.

  The Invisible Enemy by Greta de Jong (Wiley-Blackwell). The civil rights movement ended most forms of open, legal segregation in the 1960s. But the struggle continued against “invisible” forms of racism that claimed that inequality was the result of color-blind market forces rather than conscious corporate and public policies.

  The Color of Law by Steve Babson, Dave Riddle, and David Elsila (Wayne State University). The late Ernie Goodman, the subject of this detailed biography, was a Detroit-based attorney who devoted his career to supporting movements of the powerless, from the industrial sit-down strikes of the 1930 to the Red Scare of the 1950s to the civil rights movement and the Attica prison rebellion of the 1970s. The law, he learned, serves those with wealth unless grassroots movements create enough pressure to force the courts and the political system to provide justice.

  Chasing Molecules by Elizabeth Grossman (Island Press). Chemicals in consumer products threaten our health and planet. Some scientists are developing “green chemistry” to substitute safer alternatives.

  Working on the Railroad by Jay Youngdahl (Utah State University). Major railroads hired Navajo workers to do the most physically demanding track work, knowing that they often would be unaware of their rights under American law. An attorney who represented many of the workers draws on interviews to describe their experiences.

  Words of Protest, Words of Freedom edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman (Duke University). More than 150 poems from the 1960s – mostly from the civil rights movement -- bring alive the emotions of that time.

  Conspiracy of Silence by Chris Lamb (University of Nebraska). The campaign to desegregate baseball took more than a decade. Sportswriters for radical and African American newspapers played a crucial role, while nearly all white writers for major publications either said nothing or opposed the change.

  In the Land of the Grasshopper Song by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed (University of Nebraska). This unique account was written by two young women – a couple – who in 1908 were sent by the U.S. government to serve as “field matrons” to help native people in the remote Klamath and Salmon River country of northernmost California learn how to become “Americans.” They soon discovered that they had a great deal to learn from their hosts. They recorded their remarkable experiences with humor and honesty.
• Mink River by Brian Doyle (Oregon State University Press). This exceptional novel was written by a poet, and it shows in the lyrical style that brings alive characters and stories in a small town on the Oregon coast. Both the style and stories draw on the inhabitants’ cultural roots, from Native Americans to Irish immigrants.
• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus, Giroux). The second in a trilogy of historical novels that began with Sea of Poppies takes place in India, China, and other parts of Asia in the 19^th century when the opium trade was becoming big business. Once again, Ghosh has produced a captivating blend of thoroughly researched history, compelling characters, and colorful language.
• About Face edited by Buff Whitman-Bradley, Sarah Lazare, and Cynthia Whitman-Bradley (PM Press). In this book compiled by Courage to Resist, brave young veterans from a variety of backgrounds tell how they came to join the U.S. military and eventually to refuse to participate anymore in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
• Dear White America by Tim Wise (City Lights). The foremost white analyst of racism in America never fails to provide fresh takes as he punctures myths and defenses.
• The Highest Vocation by Helen Fox (Peter Lang). A professor at the University of Michigan trained in the bottom-up educational principles of Paolo Freire raises controversial issues about the experiences of students of the Millennial Generation. As a broad generalization, she says, faculty who work with them find them more comfortable with structure than with challenging analysis and debate and more willing to engage in quick-fix volunteerism than to commit to long-term activism on complex issues. Drawing on 32 in-depth interviews with students and faculty, she lets them do a lot of the talking about what it would take for this generation of young people to take leadership on issues of class and race.
• Wisconsin Uprising edited by Michael D. Yates (Monthly Review Press). The battle in Wisconsin in the winter of 2011 over elimination of public workers’ collective bargaining rights showed that many Americans were ready to take to the streets to oppose the corporate political agenda. But it also exposed longstanding problems in the way the union movement operates and defines its mission.
• It Started in Wisconsin edited by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle (Verso). This anthology focuses more on the historical background behind the Wisconsin struggle, as well as eyewitness accounts.
• Occupy! Edited by Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen, and others (Verso). A compilation from the Occupy! Gazette produced after Occupy Wall Street began gives readers who were not in New York a taste of the bold action and soul-searching debates participants were engaged in.
• Someplace Like America by Dale Maharidge with photographs by Michael S. Williamson (University of California). Beginning in 1980, these journalists have chronicled the decimation of America’s working class, including people left homeless by corporate profiteering. This book continues their work, including updates on families they began following 30 years ago. The foreword is by Bruce Springsteen, whose song, “Youngstown,” was inspired by an earlier book by the same authors

At-Risk by Amina Gautier (University of Georgia). Gautier is not concerned with judging the young African American characters who are the subjects of this outstanding collection of artfully written short stories, but rather with showing how they feel.

American Dreamers by Michael Kazin (A.A. Knopf). A historian gives his views on selected aspects of the American Left and finds that activists have had lasting impact on culture and social justice even if they haven’t fully achieved their goals.

Aftershock by Robert Reich (Vintage). The former U.S. Secretary of Labor has updated his book about how shifting wealth from working people to the top 1% put the economy in crisis – and what can be done now.

No Backing Down by Tameron Keyes (Ashtad). A former female stockbroker for Smith Barney details sexual harassment and discrimination she faced and takes readers through her successful court case against the Wall Street firm.

Trampling Out the Vintage by Frank Bardacke (Verso). For decades, Cesar Chavez has been remembered as a great American hero. Recently, some on the Left have dismissed him as a paranoid madman who blew the chance to build a strong union for farm workers. Bardacke argues that both stories are too simplistic and ignore important aspects of the union’s experience, including what he calls its anti-democratic culture, distance from the membership, and compliant inner circle.

Boundaries by Elizabeth Nunez (Akashic). A Caribbean immigrant with a successful career in New York’s publishing industry confronts boundary issues with her mother, a potential second husband, and her native-born bosses.

Assumption by Percival Everett (Graywolf). A black deputy sheriff in a small town in New Mexico continually finds that “reality” is not what it seems in three related murder mysteries.

Which Side Are You On? by George Ella Lyon, illustrations by Christopher Cardinale (Cinco Puntos). A children’s book tells the story of Florence Reece, the coal miner’s wife who wrote the song, “Which Side Are You On?”, during a bitter strike in 1931. The narrator is her oldest daughter, who is shown hiding under a bed to avoid bullets from company gun thugs.

The Accidental Slaveowner by Mark Auslander (University of Georgia). For more than 150 years, whites in Oxford, Georgia, have passed on a story about a black woman who was enslaved to a white minister who was the first president of Emory University. According to their account, the minister offered to set the woman free but she chose to remain with him. Meanwhile, African American families have passed down a very different account.

Weirding the War edited by Stephen Berry (University of Georgia). A collection of essays revisits the Civil War, finding not heroes and military strategists but deserters, torture, hunger, amputation, and prostitution.

• A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (McSweeney’s). In a 955-page novel, Sayles captures a major slice of American history from a working class perspective. During a five-year period at the end of the 1800s, his vivid characters are involved in the U.S. war with Spain over the Philippines and Cuba, the gold rush in the Yukon, continuing battles over racism in the South, and much more.
• Re:Imagining Change by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (PM Press). This short paperback is a useful tool to help activists think about campaign strategy and how to effectively frame issues.
• Roses for Isabella by Diana Cohn, illustrated by Amy Cordova (SteinerBooks). In this beautifully illustrated children’s book, a young girl in Ecuador tells about her life. Her parents work on a large farm that grows roses for export to the U.S. They recently switched from a farm where they were exposed to toxic chemicals to a Fair Trade producer that provides a safer work environment and pays more. A teaching guide is also available.
• Black California edited by Aparajita Nanda (Heyday). Contributors to this anthology that begins with the founding of California and moves to the present day include many well known African American writers, from Langston Hughes and Chester Himes to June Jordan and Devorah Major.
• Troublemaker by Bill Zimmerman (Doubleday). This memoir details the life of an activist who was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements and other Left causes.
• A Band of Noble Women by Melinda Plastas (Syracuse University). In the period between the two world wars, African American and white women worked together in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
• The Man Who Never Died by William M. Adler (Bloomsbury). Joe Hill, the subject of the famous song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” was a songwriter for the International Workers of the World who was executed in 1915 by Mormon authorities in Utah for a murder he did not commit.
• Nature’s Northwest by William G. Robbins and Katrine Barber (University of Arizona). A readable and informative history of the past hundred years in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia) provides an overview that integrates political economy, cultural and social changes, and conflicts over environmental protection. A great way to learn history that ought to be taught in school.
• A History of Design from the Victorian Era to the Present by Ann Ferebee (W.W. Norton). With hundreds of illustrations, this survey follows four phases in the development of modern architecture, interior design, industrial design, graphic design, and photography, showing how cultural and technological changes influenced design across multiple art forms.
• Salvage Secrets by Joanne Palmisano, photographs by Susan Teare (W.W. Norton). Poor people around the world have always used reused salvaged materials in home building. Now, Americans need to do so too in order to cut waste, protect our environment, and increase sustainability. This guide with text and beautiful photos gives tips and examples for reusing and repurposing wood, glass, metal, stone, and other materials.

• The Ringer by Jenny Shank (Permanent Press). This engaging novel is based on an actual incident in which Denver police mistakenly killed an innocent Mexican immigrant. The story begins with the killing and follows the families of both the victim and the police officer who was responsible.
• Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday). This may be the best introductory book on the U.S. war on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The core of it is the story of Pat Tillman, an NFL football player who volunteered to serve in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tillman was killed by friendly fire – a fact the Pentagon and Bush White House deliberately covered up. Krakauer provides a gripping account of Tillman’s life, warts and all; the circumstances of his death; and the attempt to exploit him as a martyr supposedly killed in battle. At the same time, the book provides thorough yet accessible historical background behind Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan.
• Intern Nation by Ross Perlin (Verso). Up to 2 million Americans of all ages do work for which they are not properly paid – often in violation of federal and state labor laws – because their employer claims they are not really employees but “interns.” This trend in the U.S. economy ranges from big corporations – such as Disney World where essential tasks are performed by 8,000 “interns” each year – to universities, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations that profess to be working for social justice but do not treat their own workers accordingly.
• The Great American Stickup by Robert Scheer (Nation Books). A former L.A. Times reporter and current editor of Truthdig provides one of the most readable accounts yet of how Presidents Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama allowed Wall Street to enrich itself while jeopardizing most Americans’ economic security.
• Go the F__k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortes (Akashic). A beautifully illustrated bedtime story written in children’s book rhymes but aimed at exhausted parents who sometimes lose their patience (and who have a certain sense of humor). “The flowers doze low in the meadows, and high on the mountains so steep. My life is a failure, I’m a sh_tty-ass parent. Stop f_cking with me, please, and sleep.”
• Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges (Nation Books). In a convincing and bitter rant, a former N.Y. Times reporter details how the corporate elite has defeated and coopted the Democratic Party, universities, the news media, unions, religious institutions, and other pillars of the liberal class that once provided a buffer between working people and raw corporate power. Like nearly all recent books about the sorry state of the world, it does not end with any suggestion of what to do.
• The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary by Andrew Westoll (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The U.S. is the last nation that still tortures chimpanzees and injects them with deadly viruses in the name of scientific research. To explore the toll this takes, Westoll spent months at a sanctuary for chimps rescued from one of the research “labs.”
• Local Economic Development in the 21^st Century by Daphne T. Greenwood and Richard P.F. Holt (M.E. Sharpe). In very readable prose aimed at community activists and public officials, two economics professors argue that “economic development” can no longer simply mean attracting big corporations on whatever terms they dictate but must take into account environmental sustainability, quality of life, and economic and social equity.
• Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights edited by Robert W. McChesney and Victor Pickard (The New Press). This anthology of writings by many of the leading progressive media critics provides thoughtful perspectives on key questions about how Americans will get information in the future, how to promote a diversity of voices, and whether there is still an important role for professional journalists.
• The Fear Within by Scott Martelle (Rutgers University Press). Throughout American history, crises have been exploited to take away freedom of speech from those whose beliefs challenge powerful economic interests. A former L.A. Times reporter looks back at the 1949 trial of the leaders of the Communist Party U.S.A. who were prosecuted not for actions they had taken but for their ideas and beliefs. His goal is not to lionize the defendants, but to remind Americans, in the age of the Patriot Act, how easily our freedoms can be taken away in the name of protecting them.
• AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers by Kim Scipes (Lexington). With the knowledge of only a handful of American union members, the international activities of America’s largest labor federation have been funded for decades primarily by the U.S. government, whose overseas agenda has more to do with making the world safe for corporate profiteering than with protecting workers’ rights. The AFL-CIO has made some changes in its global work since new federation leadership was elected in 1995, but Scipes argues that in too many cases it is still supporting programs and policies that sabotage independent worker movements abroad that challenge U.S. corporate interests.
• Green is the New Red by Will Potter (City Lights). Since 9/11, corporate interests have intensified a drive to have civil disobedience and other methods of protest labeled as “domestic terrorism” under state and federal laws. Much of this coordinated effort has initially been focused on those who have engaged in direct action against environmental and animal abuse issues. The author does not approve of all tactics these activists have used, but he makes a strong case that new restrictions, drastic penalties, and selective prosecution represent a revival of the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Once new precedents are established, he argues, other types of protesters against corporate abuses will be targeted as well.
• When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home by Paula J. Caplan (MIT Press). When veterans who make it home from Afghanistan or Iraq have psychological issues, the assumption often is that they need therapy and psychiatric drugs. A Harvard-based psychologist argues that in many cases what they are experiencing is a healthy reaction to an inhumane experience, and that therapy and drugs isolate them at a time when they most need honest communication with loved ones, neighbors, and co-workers. She gives detailed, practical advice for non-veterans about how to ask the right questions and how to listen, both so veterans will be able to share what they’ve been through and so the society that sent them will have a better understanding of the wars’ realities.
• Civil Rights History from the Ground Up edited by Emilye Crosby (University of Georgia). This powerful anthology challenges established myths about the civil rights movement – that it started with an unplanned impulse by Rosa Parks to sit in the front of a bus, that it was the product of Martin Luther King’s vision, that it took place only in the South, and so on. Contributors also examine debates within the movement over sexism, nonviolence, and other issues.
• Valentine’s Café by Anthony Schmitz. Cultural collisions in a diverse neighborhood provide the background theme in this fanciful, not always politically correct e-book novel. The higher powers send the God of Love, Victor Valentine, to St. Paul, Minnesota where, along with a beautiful Mob-connected chef, he opens a restaurant designed to spark love and/or sex among the customers. Before long, a local minister wants the site for a mega-church, picketers are outside, and politicians are out to get him.
• Fields of Resistance by Silvia Giagnoni (Haymarket). A writer provides an engaging personal account of seven months spent in Immokalee, Florida, “tomato capital of the world,” during a campaign to pressure Burger King to increase migrant farmworkers’ pay. Through the stories of people she met, Giagnoni explores the human reality behind issues such as immigration, workers’ rights, corporate accountability, the real cost of our food, and more.
• Understanding Green Building Materials by Traci Rose Rider, Stacy Glass, and Jessica McNaughton (W.W. Norton). One promising source for green jobs is the production and use of more sustainable building materials that reduce waste, health hazards, and energy inefficiency.
• The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor by Steve Early (Haymarket) and Stronger Together by Don Stillman (Chelsea Green). These two books, aimed at a narrow audience of labor insiders, present dueling portraits of SEIU, the nation’s fastest growing and most politically active union during the 14 years it was led by former president Andy Stern. Stronger Together is the union’s official account that portrays Stern as a bold visionary who was unwilling to stand by as the labor movement continued to shrink, fighting for universal health care and labor law reform and launching innovative organizing and political strategies to help low-wage workers form unions in sectors such as health care, home care, child care, and office building cleaning and security. The Civil Wars takes the opposite view. According to Early, who retired after 27 years as a staffer for the Communications Workers, Stern wielded Stalinist, one-man power that allowed him to treat the union treasury as a piggy bank, make backroom deals with corporate employers, promote his own self-interest in politics, and engage in costly power struggles with former allies within labor’s leadership.
• Restoring the Power of Unions by Julius G. Getman (Yale University). A law professor praises the leadership of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees union (HERE), criticizes union leaders who have focused on trying to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and gives his proposals for reform of the nation’s labor laws.
• Failure by Design by Josh Bivens (Cornell University) provides 46 useful charts or graphs that illustrate the impact of increased economic inequality in America as a result of public policy choices influenced by corporate lobbyists. One useful concept the report advances is the “inequality tax” that working people are paying in a variety of ways as public policies drive down their incomes and savings. More information from the Economic Policy Institute where Bivens works is available in the online publication, The State of Working America 2011.
• Winner-Take-All-Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (Simon & Schuster) describes a vicious circle in which increasing economic inequality has strengthened the power of wealthy elites over both major political parties, leading to policies that result in even more economic inequality, which leads to more corporate domination of politics, and so on.
• The Sacred White Turkey by Frances Washburn (University of Nebraska). A Lakota medicine woman and her granddaughter find a white turkey on their doorstep on Easter morning. Is it a sign of some kind, or just an unusual bird? So begins this entertaining novel about one native community.
• Work Song by Ivan Doig (Riverhead). In the tall tale style of the Old West, this novel describes Butte, Montana, right after World War I. A newcomer to town unwillingly gets caught up in the ongoing battle between Anaconda Copper Co. and its union miners.
• While Mortals Sleep by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacorte) is a collection of previously unpublished short stories that remind us of the late author’s unique ability to write about serious issues like class and work with a light and ironic touch.
• There is Power in a Union by Philip Dray (Doubleday). This 674-page history of industrial unions in the U.S. provides a useful introductory overview by compiling information from many other accounts in one place. Covering nearly 200 years in one volume, its weakness is that it only skims the surface of many events and barely mentions the rise of public employee unionism, rank-and-file reform movements in a number of major unions, and many other key topics.
• Working the Night Shift by Reena Patel (Stanford University). Call centers in India are staffed primarily by women who work at night to accommodate the time difference with the U.S. and other countries. This academic study explores the social impacts.
• My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir, photographs by Scot Miller (Houghton Mifflin). The naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club kept this journal during the summer of 1869. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” On the 100^th anniversary of its publication in 1911, the text is matched with 72 color photos taken in recent years.
• Making the San Fernando Valley by Laura R. Barraclough (University of Georgia). An academic traces the history of a major suburb of Los Angeles, exploring efforts to maintain white privilege in the name of preserving rural heritage – a dynamic she says is playing out in many other rural and exurban areas of the U.S.
• A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu (Archipelago). A Canadian sailor is stranded in the northernmost tip of Siberia and gradually becomes part of a native community there in this touching story. As he learns more about the natives’ relationship with the natural world and their tradition of helping each other survive in the harsh Arctic climate, he begins to wonder about the future of his own civilization.
• Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr (Akashic). While a novel, this reads like a very personal and revealing memoir of the childhood years the Japanese-American author spent living with her grandparents in a small town in rural Wisconsin in the early 1970s. The story’s drama builds after an African American couple – one a teacher, one a nurse – move in to the all-white town.
• Beautiful Rust by Ken Meisel (Bottom Dog Press). A Detroit native writes in this collection of vivid prose poems about his experiences from childhood to adulthood in a city where “the churches and the factories, both, have been abandoned by the God they promised us.”
• Dharma Road by Brian Haycock (Hampton Roads). A likeable Texas cab driver writes in a chatty style about his work, his study of Zen Buddhism, and the intersection of the two.
• Crossing Zero by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould (City Lights). Journalists who have been covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than 20 years explain the history of American policy toward those countries. Bush’s policies in the region were counterproductive, they argue, and Obama’s even more so.
• Drowning in Oil by Loren C. Steffy (McGraw-Hill). A columnist for the Houston Chronicle does an excellent job of both exposing BP’s “reckless pursuit of profit” that preceded the oil disaster off the Gulf Coast and giving voice to some of the oil workers and communities who have been affected.
• Accountability and White Anti-Racist Organizing edited by Bonnie Berman Cushing et al. (Crandall, Dostie & Douglass Books). White anti-racism organizers talk from personal experience about the complexities of their work in a variety of settings – post-Katrina New Orleans, public schools, a faith community, a tenants’ rights campaign, a social services agency, and more. As the editors note, what they all have in common is asking white people, “What are you willing to give up? How uncomfortable are you willing to be? What are you willing to risk?”
• Sitting In and Speaking Out by Jeffrey A. Turner (University of Georgia). This is a history of both black and white student movements on college campuses in the South during the 1960s.
• War is a Lie by David Swanson (www.warisalie.org). Are U.S. wars fought against evil forces, launched in self-defense, unavoidable, and necessary for our security? The former press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign reviews a pattern of official lies about U.S. wars over the past hundred years that continues to this day.
• The Fiery Trial by Eric Foner (W.W. Norton). How did Abraham Lincoln’s views and actions regarding slavery evolve -- from his proposal as a member of Congress that slaves should gradually be sent to Africa or to Caribbean countries and their owners compensated by the government to his issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves in the Confederacy (but not in the North)?
• She Was One of Us by Brigid O’Farrell (Cornell). Eleanor Roosevelt was an active ally and supporter of the union movement both during and after her years as First Lady.
• Making Home From War edited by Brian Komei Dempster (Heyday). A number of books have recounted the experience of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. In this book, 12 of them describe what they went through when the war was over.
• Word on the Street by Richard Nagler (Heyday). Over many years this photographer created intriguing juxtapositions by taking candid pictures of people on the street in front of signs or graffiti containing a single word.
• Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit (University of California). This book is an atlas about San Francisco and the Bay Area, but may be of interest even if you don’t live or visit there because of its innovative approach to presenting a place. Its 22 maps, accompanied by varying combinations of short lyrical essays, photos, poems, and interview quotes, each focus on a theme or neighborhood with juxtapositions designed to make the reader take a fresh look: the city as experienced over time by its black residents, the area as a base for a conservative/military brain trust, the green spaces that women organized to protect, and much more.
• Rebel Rank and File edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow (Verso). Many young people today have heard about movements from the 1960s to the early 1980s involving civil rights, women’s liberation, environmental protection, equality for gays and lesbians, opposition to the Vietnam War, and more. But few know that during that same period there was a widespread upsurge among workers in many industries, challenging corporate interests as well as old guard union leaders. Thousands of workers engaged in illegal strikes, slowdowns, and other militant actions that are hard to imagine in today’s climate. In this important collection of essays, authors with a range of leftist ideological leanings describe the upheavals that took place in a variety of industries. For the most part, they make a real effort to be honest and thoughtful, to avoid romanticizing, and to explore what could have been done differently so that the greatest worker rebellion since the 1930s might have had more lasting impact.
• Seaside Dreams by Janet Costa Bates and Lambert Davis (Lee & Low). This charming children’s book focuses on the mutually supportive relationship between a young girl and her grandmother, an immigrant to the U.S. from Cape Verde.
• Land Sharks by S.L. Stoner (Yamhill). The second in an historical mystery series centered around Portland, Oregon, this sequel to Timber Beasts describes the practice of shanghaiing – in which working men were kidnapped and forced to work on ocean-going ships.
• Let Freedom Sing by Vivian B. Kline (Outskirts Press). In this innovative historical novel, a group of high school students conducts research on the experience of African Americans in the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. The students hope to develop a musical centered on the first Fisk University Jubilee Singers. In the process, they learn a great deal about many of the key historical figures of that time, including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Todd Lincoln, P.T. Barnum, and many more.
• Postville U.S.A. edited by Mark Grey, Michele Devlin, and Aaron Goldsmith (Gemma). A small town in rural Iowa was home to the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant until a raid by federal immigration authorities resulted in the arrest of one-fifth of the town’s residents. Two professors and a former city council member lay out lessons they think other towns should learn from Postville’s experience with diversity.
• East Eats West by Andrew Lam (Heyday). The author, who emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam with his family when he was a child, explores the interaction of Asian and North American cultures in this collection of short nonfiction stories.
• The Verso Book of Dissent edited by Andrew Hsiao and Andrea Lim (Verso). 325 pages of short quotations are drawn from people from all over the world who have challenged the established order, from ancient Egypt to the present day. It could be useful as a reference book and to point the reader to the full texts.
• Greening Modernism by Carl Stein (W.W. Norton). A professor delves into the details of what it will take to make our buildings energy efficient and sustainable. As one example, he compares the sustainability of retrofitting a school building with skylights vs. converting to electricity from solar panels or wind turbines.
• The Chieu Hoi Saloon by Michael Harris (PM Press). In this very dark novel, a Vietnam vet who has not recovered from shooting a civilian during the war returns only to see his two-year-old daughter.
• Railroad Noir by Linda Grant Niemann with photographs by Joel Jensen (Indiana University). Niemann writes short vignettes drawn from 20 years working as one of the first female "brakemen" on American railroads. Her accounts of how the quality of worklife has deteriorated in the era of increased corporate power could apply to many other kinds of work as well. Jensen's photos of railroad life are stunning.
• Glorious by Bernice L. McFadden (Akashic). An intense historical novel about a black woman who rises to become a successful writer during the Harlem Renaaissance.
• No Space for Further Burials by Feryal Ali Gauhar (Akashic). In this dark novel, a U.S. army medic is captured in Afghanistan and held in an asylum for the insane. The author, a journalist from Pakistan who has been imprisoned twice by her own government, tries to capture the insanity and human cost of war.
• Disaster on the Horizon by Bob Cavnar (Chelsea Green). If you want to know more about how BP's oil disaster happened in the Gulf and why the government's response was so inadequate, this oil executive-turned-critic provides the background.
• Stayin' Alive by Jefferson Cowie (The New Press). This political and cultural history explores the 1970s as the transition from the end of the New Deal era to the beginning of the global corporate domination we are living with today.
• Networking for People Who Hate Networking by Devora Zack (BK). A more accurate title might have been "How Introverts Can Cope and Be Accommodated." An example of the book's practical advice: in a brainstorming meeting, ask everyone to write down a few ideas before the discussion begins. That makes it more likely that introverts as well as free-speaking extroverts will participate.
• A California Bestiary by Rebecca Solnit and Mona Caron (Heyday). A little book full of interesting tidbits about a dozen different creatures, with colorful illustrations. How does the bluebelly lizard help prevent lyme disease? What does a desert tortoise do all day? Which woodpecker stores acorns in holes it makes in trees?
• An American in Persia: A Pilgrimage to Iran by Richard A. Kauffman (Cascadia). A Mennonite writer and theologian reports on his interactions with Iranians and their views of the United States.
• Low Bite by Sin Soracco (PM Press). A novel about women in prison that sees little difference between morality inside or outside the walls.
  drown while he sits nearby in a drunken stupor.
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (The New Press). The civil rights movement challenged employment and housing discrimination and the denial of voting rights and access to education. Today, however, millions of people of color are denied basic rights because they are in jail or are convicted felons. A law professor and former ACLU attorney documents how mass incarceration has become a new legal form of Jim Crow – and asks why progressive Americans, including traditional civil rights groups, are doing so little about it.
• The Can Man by Laura E. Williams and Craig Orback (Lee and Low). In this children’s book, a young boy watches a neighbor collect cans for survival after becoming homeless because of hard times. The boy gets the idea that he could collect the cans instead in order to buy a new skateboard. Eventually, the man teaches him some lessons about human kindness and community.
• Yasmin’s Hammer by Ann Malaspina and Doug Ghayka (Lee and Low). A girl in Bangladesh yearns to go to school, but her family’s survival depends on the income she makes working in a brickyard. This children’s story gently explores conditions and dilemmas that are unfamiliar to many Americans.
• Dreams of Repair by Eleanor Rubin (Charta). As the late Howard Zinn suggests in his introduction to this collection of works by a longtime printmaker and watercolor artist, Rubin’s art responds to suffering in the world but on a life-affirming, emotional level rather than as propaganda.
• Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan (The New Press). Germany’s economy is far healthier than the U.S.’s by virtually every measure, yet Germans enjoy far more paid time off and superior social benefits such as education, child care,  and health care. In Geoghegan’s usual meandering storytelling style, he recounts multiple trips to Germany to understand why their version of capitalism seems to be working better than America’s.
• The Climate War by Eric Pooley (Hyperion). A veteran journalist describes the inside story of the political fight over climate change legislation, including the role White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has played in delaying and weakening Obama administration efforts on the issue.
• The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell by Jamie Court (Chelsea Green). A consumer activist shares his thoughts about issue campaigning. One of his themes is that the key to victory often is to force a more powerful opponent into making a mistake you can exploit.
• Customer Service by Benoit Duteurtre (Melville House). In this novella, a French journalist loses his smart phone and enters into 74 pages of hellishly frustrating interaction with today’s impersonal corporations.
• 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently by Michael A. Bellesiles (The New Press). 1877, like 1968 or 2001, was a year in which events converged to change the course of U.S. history. An historian writes in accessible style about a year of economic depression in which white mobs attacked African Americans and Mexicans, a national railroad strike headlined a series of major battles between working people and big capital, and the U.S. Army faced stiff resistance from Native Americans.
• Solidarity Stories by Harvey Schwartz (University of Washington). An oral history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union features first-person memories from union officials such as longtime president Harry Bridges as well as rank-and-file workers from the Pacific Coast ports, fields of Hawaii, and Powell’s bookstore in Portland, OR.
• Frederick Law Olmsted: Essential Texts edited by Robert Twombly (W.W. Norton). Olmsted designed some of the most famous public parks in America. This collection of his writings reveals his thoughts about landscape architecture and the development of cities.
• The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha (Broadway). In this masterfully written novel, a 15-year-old Oregon boy is killed at home by a 19-year-old intruder. As the legal system takes many years to process the case, the victim’s mother believes that only the execution of the man who killed her son will bring her closure. Over time, she learns deeper truths about the crime, about herself, and about human connection.
• Green Gone Wrong by Heather Rogers (Scribner). Many Americans feel that we are taking meaningful action about climate change by substituting cloth shopping bags for plastic ones or buying organic food. But really doing something requires joining together to win government action to control greenhouse gas emissions, develop and distribute alternative energy, invest in mass transit, encourage sustainable local food production, and address the global wealth gap.
• Ending the U.S. War in Afghanistan by David Wildman and Phyllis Bennis (Olive Branch). In question and answer format, analysts from the United Methodist Church and the Institute of Policy Studies provide essential background on the real reasons for the Bush invasion of Afghanistan and the continuation of the war by President Obama. They also address the question of how the U.S. can bring its involvement to an end.
• 13 Bankers by Simon Johnson and James Kwak (Pantheon). This book explains in convincing detail how Wall Street destroyed the economy, why elected officials and regulators in both the Bush and Obama administrations failed to take the necessary action, and what ought to be done now.
• Colorblind by Tim Wise (City Lights). America needs not to “move beyond” race but to adopt innovative public policies that directly address it. Wise gives specific ideas of what those policies might be. Also worth reading is a recent blog entry by the same author, Imagine if the Tea Party was Black.
• No One is Illegal by Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis (Haymarket). This timely and informative book makes clear that current immigration policy is deliberately designed to ensure a supply of cheap labor for corporate interests. It recounts the history of anti-immigrant violence and discrimination in the U.S. and describes the current movement for real immigration reform.
• Seeds of Change by John Atlas (Vanderbilt University). The president of the National Housing Institute has written an impressively detailed, thoughtful, and honest history of ACORN, from its founding to its recent reorganization forced by right-wing attacks.
• Share This! by Deanna Zandt (Berrett-Koehler). An experienced progressive activist shares her knowledge and insights about the potential and limits of social networking.
• The Autobiography of an Execution by David R. Dow (Twelve). A Texas law professor who has handled appeals in more than a hundred death penalty cases provides a powerful personal account of the issues, contradictions, and stresses that his work involves.
• A Shameful Business by James A. Gross (Cornell University). Politicians of various stripes occasionally find it useful to decry human rights abuses in other countries. This book details the human rights abuses built into the American workplace, where property rights are consistently valued over workers’ rights.
• Spirit of Rebellion by Jarod Roll (University of Illinois). In Missouri in the 1930s, black and white farmers inspired by Pentecostal revivals joined forces to fight for economic justice.
• When Chicken Soup Isn’t Enough edited by Suzanne Gordon (Cornell University). Seventy registered nurses, most of them in the U.S., tell briefly about times they have challenged obstacles to providing quality patient care. Most of these vignettes involve individual action such as confronting a doctor or administrator.
• The Illuminated Landscape edited by Gary Noy and Rick Heide (Heyday). This varied anthology of essays, poetry, and stories focuses on the Sierra Nevada region of California from the earliest days of human habitation to the present. It includes work by local authors as well as excerpts from works by some of America’s most famous writers.
• Victors’ Justice From Nuremberg to Baghdad by Danilo Zolo (Verso). An Italian academic argues that international law is not impartial but political, legitimizing imperialism and labeling resistance as terrorism.
• Moving Millions by Jeffrey Kaye (Wiley). As the national debate about immigration heats up again, a former reporter for PBS NewsHour shows that the policy changes being discussed do not address the underlying reasons that cause people to emigrate in the first place, including their own poverty and powerlessness and the hunger of multinational corporations for cheap and exploitable labor.
• Everything but the Coffee by Bryant Simon (University of California). This thoughtful, in-depth study of Starbucks and its customers concludes that Americans want what the company claims it offers – community, fair treatment of workers and food producers, and protection of the environment. But it questions whether consuming the products of big corporations like Starbucks actually yields those outcomes.
• Working edited by Hart, Mangino, Murphy, and Taliercio (New City Community and Syracuse University). A diverse group of working people in Syracuse took part in writing workshops and produced this powerful anthology of stories, poems, and photographs about the lives of postal workers, waitresses, electricians, truck drivers, telemarketers, firefighters, nurses, and others.
• If The Church Were Christian by Philip Gulley (HarperOne). A Quaker minister suggests that if churches more closely followed Jesus’ values and teachings, it would focus more on inclusion rather than exclusion, reconciliation rather than judgment, meeting needs rather than maintaining institutions, and inviting questions rather than insisting on rigid answers.
• Rematerial by Alejandro Bahamon and Maria Cimla Sanjines (W.W. Norton). One step toward sustainability is to design buildings using materials that have previously been considered “waste.” This includes converting existing structures to new purposes rather than tearing them down, recycling used building materials, and making use of waste products such as paper cups and scrap wood and metal. This book combines text and photos to show examples from all over the world.
• Revolt on Goose Island by Kari Lydersen (Melville House). The sit-down strike by workers at Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago in December, 2008, became a symbol of working people’s frustration with the increasing gap in wealth and power in America. A Washington Post reporter was on the scene and makes the story come alive.
• At the Altar of the Bottom Line by Tom Juravich (University of Massachusetts). Four case studies show how corporations’ profits-before-people mentality is affecting working people in the U.S. The stories focus on a Verizon call center, a fish-processing plant staffed by undocumented workers, Boston Medical Center, and a machinery factory that was closed despite the best efforts of a highly skilled workforce. The book comes with a CD that includes four original songs by the author, a well known musician.
• Working for Justice edited by Ruth Milkman, Joshua Bloom, and Victor Narro (Cornell University). Los Angeles, once one of the country’s most antiunion towns, is now a center of innovative organizing strategies, as shown by these 11 case studies.
• Hazard by Gardiner Harris (Minotaur). As the recent Massey mine disaster in West Virginia reminded the nation of the dangers of coal mining without union safety protections, the public health reporter for the New York Times released his new mystery novel about corporate and governmental abuses in the mines of eastern Kentucky.
• Cesar Chavez: A Photographic Essay by Ilan Stavans (Cinco Puntos) tells the story of Chavez’s role in United Farm Worker organizing, using photos and a small amount of text aimed mainly at young people.
• Sea of Poppies by Amitay Ghosh (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). One of the best written and most engaging novels to come along in years. It follows the interlocking stories of a range of intriguing characters and at the same time tells a lot about India’s roots from the days of British colonial rule.
• The Sound of Water by Sanjay Bahadur (Atria International). This short novel about coal miners in India tells a very human story while conveying the author’s cynical view of that country’s hierarchical and bureaucratic culture.
• Timber Beasts by S.L. Stoner (Yamhill Press). This entertaining mystery novel is set against the background of the struggles between timber workers and big logging interests in the early 1900s.
• Can They Do That? By Lewis Maltby (Portfolio). Without a union, constitutional rights generally stop at the workplace door. In most cases, it is legal for companies to fire or discipline workers for their political views or their private lifestyle. Increasingly, corporations test applicants for genetic diseases or personal psychological profiles before making hiring decisions. Some employers use the Global Positioning System capacity of company-issued cell phones to track workers’ activities during off hours. The U.S. frequently criticizes human rights violations in other countries, but maintains a system of employment law that allows corporations to trample on workers’ fundamental rights every day.
• I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett (Graywolf). Everett is an equal opportunity satirist, skewering everyone from white Americans to the black middle class to Hollywood, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, and even himself, an African American college professor. It helps to be familiar with the major films Poitier appeared in.
• Teaching What Really Happened by James W. Loewen (Teachers College Press). A guide for students, parents, and teachers who want to analyze class and racial bias in how history is taught in most American schools and then look in new ways at such topics as the “conquest” of North America, slavery, the Civil War, and race relations today.
• On a Dollar a Day by Christopher Greenslate and Kerri Leonard (Hyperion). Two high school teachers in southern California decide to limit their food budget to the dollar a day that many of the world’s people exist on. Then they try the federal government’s official Thrifty Food Plan for people on food stamps. In the process, they explore a range of fundamental issues about food and justice.
• Mothers’ Work and Children’s Lives by Rucker C. Johnson, Ariel Kalil, and Rachel E. Dunifon (Upjohn Institute). Welfare reform under President Clinton was supposed to help children by pushing their mothers into the workforce. More than a decade later, studies show that children generally do benefit when their mothers are provided work with good wages and consistent hours, but suffer increased behavioral problems and poor performance in school if their mothers are pressured to work irregular hours in unstable, low-wage jobs.
• NAFTA and Labor in North America by Norman Caulfield (University of Illinois). On the 20^th anniversary of the beginning of the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, workers in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada are all worse off. Traditional union strategies based primarily on affecting national trade policies have proven to be inadequate in a global economy in which capital knows no boundaries.|
• The End of the Revolution by Wang Hui (Verso). A Chinese professor challenges in intellectual terms China’s one-party, bureaucratic state and the capitalist model being imported by global corporations.
• Agitate! Educate! Organize! by Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher (Cornell University Press). High-quality reproductions of more than 250 posters related to the U.S. labor movement, together with text that provides background.
• Capitalism Hits the Fan by Richard D. Wolff (Interlink). An explanation of America’s current economic crisis, which the author has also produced in a video version by the same name from Media Education Foundation.
• The Long River Home by Larry Smith (Bottom Dog Press). A rare find, this engaging and authentic novel follows four generations of a working class family, rooted in Ohio, as they move from rural life to industrial work.
• A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya (Scribner). Joya is a young woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005 at the age of 27 and then suspended from her post because of her outspoken criticism of the regime. “We Afghans remain trapped between two enemies,” she writes, “the Taliban on one side and U.S./NATO forces and their warlord hirelings on the other.” The Karzai government, she says, is no better than the Taliban, and Afghans must be allowed to determine their own destiny.  “I hope President Obama in particular will be made to understand that more troops, more bombs, and an expanded war will solve nothing,” she concludes.
• Teaching for Joy and Justice by Linda Christensen (Rethinking Schools). Another indispensable resource from Rethinking Schools, this one focuses on inspired, practical, and proven ways to help students draw on their own lives and the world around them as they learn read and writing skills.
• The Union of Their Dreams by Miriam Pawel (Bloomsbury). Cesar Chavez led a movement that inspired millions – but that never built a functioning union for farm workers. At a time when many in the union and progressive movements seek lessons from decades of defensive battles and an overall decline in strength, a pro-labor reporter sympathetically profiles eight individuals from diverse backgrounds who played important roles in the United Farm Workers’ early successes and ultimate failure. One major theme is that a cult of personality around the top leader and a lack of democracy contributed significantly to the movement’s loss of direction.
• Waiting on a Train by James McCommons (Chelsea Green). The author spent months riding rail routes throughout America. His account, filled with entertaining anecdotes, combines history, travelogue, and discussion of public policy. With air and auto travel increasingly unsustainable, McCommons argues that the nation’s passenger rail system must be revitalized.
• Rebecca Harding Davis’ Stories of the Civil War Era edited by Sharon Harris and Robin Cadwallader (University of Georgia). Long before anyone spoke of “people’s history,” Davis roamed the states most ravaged by war, profiling working people of all backgrounds and showing the war’s effects.
• No Place for a Puritan edited by Ruth Nolan (Heyday). These essays, stories, and poems by more than 80 writers all have something to do with the history and culture of California’s deserts.
• Cursing Columbus by Eve Tal (Cinco Puntos). This sequel to the wonderfully written Double Crossing is another novel for high school age and up about Jewish immigrants in New York in the early 1900s. Besides telling interesting history, it deals with themes that are relevant to immigrants’ experience today.
• Black Body edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah (Seven Stories). Thirty writers – most, but not all, black – speak honestly and often with humor about their experiences related to the black body in American culture.
• To Die for the People by Huey Newton (City Lights). This re-release of writings by the Black Panther leader grapples with issues that remain current today. Newton writes, for example, about how he came to believe that African Americans should support the gay rights movement.
• Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson (The New Press). Workers talk about the human impact of the poverty-wage economy, and some of their supervisors, health care providers, and school teachers discuss how they bend rules in response to injustice – keeping a worker on the clock while they take their child to the doctor, sending food home with a restaurant or food store worker, providing care to someone who is uninsured, and more.
• Mexico City Noir edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo II (Akashic). It’s hard to imagine a city more suited to be the focus of the latest in Akashic’s series of newly written noir stories set in a particular metropolitan area.
• The Retail Revolution by Nelson Lichtenstein (Henry Holt). When a recent 60 Minutes poll asked “what American business best symbolizes the country today,” as many Americans chose Walmart as chose all other companies combined. Nearly half of Americans said that if Walmart offered health care such as basic check-ups, they would consider using those services. This book provides the first comprehensive account of how Walmart became the most powerful force determining the future of working people in the U.S., China, and other countries, and gives a warning about where the “Walmarting” of our economy is taking us.
• The Will to Resist by Dahr Jamail (Haymarket). Despite greater obstacles than those faced by war resisters during the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, an increasing number of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are refusing to fight, openly opposing U.S. policy, or challenging the military’s failure to confront sexual assaults and race and sex discrimination in its ranks. This book describes their efforts and includes a succinct description of the human toll the wars are taking on U.S. troops, including high rates of suicide.
• IraqiGirl by Hadia (Haymarket). An Iraqi teenager has been blogging since 2004 about her life and the impact of the war. Her blog itself is one way for American teenagers as well as adults to be exposed to her world, but this book that compiles highlights from her entries may be a more coherent and accessible vehicle. It includes discussion questions that could be used with school or youth groups.
• Wherever There’s a Fight by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi (Heyday). If a household were going to choose one U.S. history book to have as a reference, or a high school or university were picking one history textbook, this rich volume would have to be considered as it describes key events in the struggles of workers, people of color, women, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities. The focus is on California history, but much of what it describes sheds light on U.S. history as a whole, especially since California has often been a trend setter for the rest of the country.
• Feminism Seduced by Hester Eisenstein (Paradigm). This thoughtful and provocative book by a feminist academic argues that global corporations and their political allies have co-opted “mainstream feminism,” which Eisenstein says has not adequately analyzed and confronted issues of race, class, and economic globalization. The final chapter explores what the author calls “Islamophobia” and the use of professed concern for women in Afghanistan and Iraq to justify wars waged by the U.S. for other motives.
• Black Elvis by Geoffrey Becker (University of Georgia Press). A mostly high quality collection of short stories with unusual characters, including a number of musicians, in unusual situations.
• The Domino Effect by Thomas F. Coleman (Spectrum Institute). An attorney’s inspiring memoir chronicles a lifetime of strategic breakthroughs on gay and lesbian rights, personal privacy issues for all Americans, the rights of single people, respect for family diversity, and the rights of seniors, teenagers, and people with disabilities.
• Searching for Whitopia by Rich Benjamin (Hyperion). For generations, white writers have reported on black or brown communities. Benjamin, a black writer, turns the tables, living for three months each in some of the fastest growing and whitest towns in America – Coeur D’Alene, Idaho; St. George, Utah; and Forsyth County, Georgia. It’s part of his report on the rapid exodus of white urban dwellers to nearly all-white small towns across the nation.
• Citadel of the Spirit edited by Matt Love (Nestucca Spit Press). An eclectic collection of nearly 500 pages of stories, essays, and documents from Oregon’s recent and distant past on the occasion of the state’s 150^th anniversary. Just a few of the many topics: the Ku Klux Klan’s history in the state, women’s suffrage, the founding of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, abuse of Japanese Americans during and after World War II, Bigfoot, the fights over preserving salmon, the federal “termination” of the Klamath tribe, communes, the law on assisted suicide, the FBI’s investigation of the song “Louie Louie,” and many, many more.
• Sisters in the Brotherhoods by Jane Latour (Palgrave MacMillan). Drawing heavily on oral history, an experienced labor educator and journalist presents the story of women who were the first to break into blue-collar trades in New York City in the 1970s. It serves as a reminder of how much has changed, and how much hasn’t.
• The Integration Debate edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires (Routledge). Many people of all races have given up on the goal of racial integration in urban communities. And yet separate housing continues to mean unequal opportunity when it comes to education, health care, jobs, public safety, and environmental health. Leading activists and scholars debate possible solutions.
• The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata (Graywolf). A mind-opening tour of essays from all over the world, in a wide variety of styles from the earliest human writings to the present.
• Herbert Harrison by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press). This is an extraordinarily thorough effort to preserve the history of a relatively unknown but important black radical organizer who was involved with the Socialist Party, International Workers of the World, and other organizations in the early black liberation movement based in Harlem. This first of two volumes covers the years 1883-1918.
• A Community Organizer’s Tale by Mike Miller (Heyday). This memoir recalls the rise and fall of a community organization in the Mission District of San Francisco and examines the dilemmas organizations face when they achieve enough influence to gain a more insider relationship with established political forces.
• In and Out of the Working Class by Michael D. Yates (Arbeiter Ring). Using an unusual mixture of short stories and nonfiction essays, a labor economist reflects thoughtfully on the day to day realities of class in America by looking back on his life that began in a working class community and led him to a white-collar profession.
• Time to Tell by Barry Feinberg (STE). A white activist who was a leader in the movement against apartheid in South Africa looks back on 45 years of struggle, much of it spent in exile, building international pressure that helped lead to victory for the African National Congress.
• The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget by Andrew Rice (Metropolitan). An American journalist followed the trial of three military men in Uganda accused of murder during the regime of Idi Amin. The story becomes a vehicle for a broader look at the country’s history and at questions of accountability and justice.
• Human Rights in Labor and Employment Relations edited by James A Gross and Lance Compa (Labor and Employment Relations Association). A collection of essays about the use of international and domestic human rights agreements and agencies in struggles over such issues as occupational safety and health, child labor, freedom of association, migrant labor, employment discrimination, and the rights of workers with disabilities.
• Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform (Chelsea Green). The physician and former governor of Vermont makes the case for a public insurance option as a necessary part of real health care reform.
• Organizing the Curriculum edited by Rob Linne, Leigh Benin, and Adrienne Sosin (Sense Publishers). 18 essays that include some innovative practical ideas and perspectives for teaching in the public schools about the U.S. labor movement.
• Muslim Women Reformers by Ida Lichter (Prometheus). Brief profiles of Muslim feminists around the world who believe that fundamentalist extremists misrepresent the values expressed in the Koran.
• Breakthrough Communities edited by M. Paloma Pavel (MIT Press). Activists from around the U.S. have been working on interconnected issues of economy, environment, and equity on a metropolitan basis, seeking new solutions for urban, suburban, and exurban communities on such subjects as housing, transportation, land use, and employment.
• Daily Bread by Jennifer Burd with photographs by Lad Strayer (Bottom Dog Press). Prose poems and photos provide touching portraits of homeless men and women in Adrian, Michigan.
• Incantations edited by Ambar Past (Cinco Puntos). A beautiful book of poems and graphic images by Mayan women who belong to a cooperative in Chiapas, Mexico.
• An Insignificant Family by Da Ngan (Curbstone). A novel that centers on a woman who, like the author, was a guerrilla fighter for the Viet Cong while a young teenager.
• The Dog Who Loved Tortillas by Benjamin Alire Saenz (Cinco Puntos). A bilingual children’s book about two siblings who learn about sharing their new dog.
• Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein (W.W. Norton). After President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal made historic changes in the American economic and political system, the DuPont family and other businessmen began a counterattack that culminated in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Such businessmen have been the invisible hands behind what is called the conservative movement.
• Woodsburner by John Pipkin (Doubleday). The year before Henry David Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond, he accidentally set fire to 300 acres of privately owned woods near his home town of Concord. This well-written novel creates a variety of engaging characters.
• The Thoreau You Don’t Know by Robert Sullivan (HarperCollins). Aside from the persona Thoreau created for himself in Walden, who was he, how did he live, and what were the parallels between his era and our own?
• Marijuana is Safer by Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert (Chelsea Green). Three leading activists provide in-depth information on the contradictions between public policies on alcohol and marijuana.
• Seattle Noir and Portland Noir (Akashic). Two of the latest in a series of dark mystery novels centered in particular cities.
• Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives by Stephen F. Befort and John W. Budd (Stanford University Press). An academic argument that the whole framework of workplace law and public policy in the U.S. must be refocused based on three objectives: equity, efficiency, and workers’ voice.
• The Looting of America by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green). For those who want more than a vague sense that we are in an economic crisis because of manipulation by Wall Street, Leopold goes into the details about the financial industry’s complex schemes that came crashing down on the rest of us.
• Between Barack and a Hard Place by Tim Wise (City Lights). In150 pages, one of the best white voices talking to other whites about racism comments on what Obama’s election does and does not mean.
• Healing Together by Kochan, Eaton, McKersie, and Adler (Cornell). Intense labor-management conflict at Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest HMO, led to a partnership agreement covering more than 90,000 employees that has lasted more than a decade. Four academics were given access to document and analyze the experience. Both those who support and those who oppose such partnerships on ideological grounds will find fodder for their view in this detailed account.
• This Could Be the Start of Something Big by Manuel Pastor, Jr., Chris Benner, and Martha Matsuoka (Cornell University Press, 2009). Coalitions of union, religious, and community organizations have emerged in a number of major urban centers to work for improved public services and infrastructure, housing, transportation, and workforce development. In some cases, these coalitions have found common ground with some elements of business.
• Bricks Without Straw by Albion W. Tourgee (Duke University). This reprint of a novel published in 1880 is accompanied by a useful historical essay about the author and the Reconstruction period the book depicts. The book shows the human impact of the often violent campaign by the white power structure in the South to undo emancipation.
• Remembering Scottsboro by James A. Miller (Princeton). Death sentences given to eight young black men in 1931 became a major historical event impacting American arts and culture as well as politics and helping to set the stage for the civil rights movement.
• Tours of Vietnam by Scott Laderman (Duke University). What first appears to be a narrow academic study -- how U.S. guide books and other tourist materials over the past half century have described Vietnam – becomes an interesting window into Americans’ often inaccurate perceptions about our own country and the rest of the world. The last chapter examines written comments left by American visitors at a war museum in Ho Chi Minh City.
• Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway (Chelsea Green). An updated guide to home-scale permaculture designed to help make all gardens, whether urban, suburban, or rural, use less water, produce more edible plants, and require less maintenance.
• Gold Dust on His Shirt by Irene Howard (Between the Lines). This warm account of Scandinavian immigrant mining families in western Canada in the first half of the twentieth century draws on the author’s own family memories as well as archives and interviews in North America, Norway, and Sweden.
• The Quality of Home Runs by Thomas P. Carter (Duke University). Politics, culture, and history are mixed in this academic study of baseball in Cuba.
• Sundays in America by Suzanne Strempek Shea (Beacon). The writer visited a different American place of worship each Sunday for a year, traveling to more than thirty states. Her short vignettes about each experience provide an interesting overview of what today’s religious practices do and do not have in common.
• The Lonely Soldier by Helen Benedict (Beacon). About 1 of 9 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is female. Nearly a third who have returned home say they were sexually assaulted by male military personnel while there. The trauma they suffered is largely ignored by the Department of Veterans Affairs and by society as a whole.
• Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould (City Lights). It’s now President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. If the history told by these journalists is any guide, it could very well become his Vietnam.
• Mandate for Change edited by Chester W. Hartman (Lexington). What do progressives want President Obama to do? Leading activists and analysts contributed chapters on 47 topics to answer that question.
• Dancing on Live Embers by Tina Lopes and Barb Thomas (Between the Lines) is a detailed, practical guide to combating racism in organizations.
• Teaching Green: The High School Years edited by Tim Grant and Gail Littlejohn (New Society). Tested ideas for lesson plans, projects, experiments, and other ways of engaging teenagers in hands-on learning about ecology, sustainability, and other green issues.
• Ruins by Achy Obejas (Askashic). A novel that centers on a Cuban who gradually becomes disillusioned with the revolution.
• Leaving Resurrection by Eva Saulitis (Boreal Books). An intimate personal memoir by a woman who studied Alaska’s whales (and her own relationships and inner life) every summer for many years.
• Localist Movements in a Global Economy by David J. Hess (MIT). Can acting locally make a real impact on globalization? Hess looks critically at four sets of experiences: “buy local” campaigns, urban gardens, local ownership of electricity and transportation, and community media.
• Nice Work if You Can Get It by Andrew Ross (NYU). The jobs of “creative class” professionals around the world are increasingly insecure and temporary in ways that bear some resemblance to the experiences of low-wage laborers.
• The Canal Builders by Julie Greene (Penguin Press). The building of the Panama Canal in the ten years before World War I by tens of thousands of workers from around the world is often described in terms of its political and economic impact or its technological challenges. This book focuses on the workers who built it and their attempts to win better conditions.
• Shadow of the Racketeer by David Witwer (University of lllinois). This study argues that the first media coverage in the 1930s of emerging corruption in certain unions ignored the ways employers benefited from sweetheart arrangements with mobsters, and that labor’s failure to promptly clean house allowed its opponents to permanently cast a shadow over public support for the union movement.
• The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History edited by Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, and Immanuel Ness (M.E. Sharpe). Nearly 800 pages of analysis of important labor struggles from a variety of perspectives, as well as accounts of particular landmark battles.
• Condensed Capitalism by Daniel Sidorick (Cornell). This history of Campbell Soup’s factory in New Jersey provides a case study of the evolution of mobile capitalism and the decline of the labor movement in the 20^th century.
• Thinking Big edited by James Lardner and Nathaniel Loewentheil (Berrett-Koehler).  Progressive organizations from throughout the U.S. collaborated on a small paperback filled with practical ideas for real change in the Obama era, with a focus on the economy, green jobs, health care, and education.
• Agenda for a New Economy by David C. Korten (Berrett-Koehler).  Does bailing out Wall Street benefit most Americans? The author of “When Corporations Rule the World” steps back and examines how Wall Street actually works, proposing both short- and long-term reforms.
• The Great Financial Crisis by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff (Monthly Review). Explores the shift from production to “financialization” of the U.S. economy and the roots of the current crisis.
• Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss (Graywolf). These refreshingly original and lyrical essays have a common theme -- race in America. Drawing on her experiences teaching school in Harlem, writing for an African American newspaper in San Diego, studying Spanish in Baja California, observing Katrina from afar in a college town in Iowa, and living in a mixed neighborhood in Chicago, Biss uses unusual juxtapositions and literary and cultural references to link the personal and the political.
• To Siberia by Per Petterson (Graywolf).  In another skillful novel from the author of Out Stealing Horses, a teenage girl in Denmark narrates as she and her brother come of age in the time of resistance to the Nazi occupation.
• The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga (Graywolf). A Basque teenager growing up in the 1960s gradually becomes aware of social issues in a very personal way as he learns about his father’s involvement with the Spanish fascists and about the separatist movement.
• Hijacking Sustainability by Adrian Parr (MIT).  Corporations like Walmart and British Petroleum, as well as the U.S. military, have adopted the rhetoric of sustainability without the substance, according to this study written in academic prose.
• Climate Change by Jon Clift and Amanda Cuthbert (Chelsea Green). While climate change and related energy issues require big systemic solutions, this well-presented booklet helps increase awareness by providing small but immediate steps that individuals can take.
• The Case for Collaborative School Reform by Ray Marshall (Economic Policy Institute). This case study of the Toledo, Ohio schools argues that both school district managers and teachers’ unions need to change in order to improve public education.
• Grading Education by Richard Rothstein (Teachers College Press). Accountability in education is crucial but it must take into account the ability to think critically, preparation for skilled work, social skills, and other factors in addition to knowledge of specific facts. It also must recognize that student outcomes are affected by many influences besides the schools. This Economic Policy Institute researcher proposes ways to rethink standardized tests and to add a meaningful inspection system to promote accountability.
• The Teaching Penalty by Allegretto, Corcoran, and Mishel (Economic Policy Institute). While political debate often focuses on the structure of teacher pay (such as proposals for merit pay), the total pay and benefit package for teachers continues to fall further behind compensation for comparable professions, making it harder to attract and retain the highest quality educators.
• Legacies of Brown edited by Carter, Flores, and Reddick (Harvard Educational Review). Fifty years after the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools are not equal, these essays review developments since then involving desegregation, bilingual education, and the impact of the decision on other areas of the law.
• Embedded with Organized Labor by Steve Early (Monthly Review). A collection of book reviews and articles, mainly from the left media, by a 27-year staffer for the Communications Workers of America, long-time contributor to Labor Notes, and fierce critic of SEIU President Andy Stern.
• Mexico Unconquered by John Gibler (City Lights). This left journalist who lives in Mexico argues that the battle over conquest that began when Cortes arrived from Spain hundreds of years ago continues today as a struggle between the country’s poor majority and a small elite of billionaires.
• The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar (HarperCollins, 2005). This poignant novel about a woman in India who works as a house maid and the woman who employs her is both an absorbing story and one of the best explorations of the human effects of class inequalities.
• Long After I’m Gone by Deborah Good with Nelson Good (DreamSeekers Books). A writer in her 20s spent many hours interviewing her dying father about his life spent helping to create educational, spiritual, and community centers and projects in Washington, DC. This very personal account makes the reader think about the importance of building community in every facet of life and about what the author aptly calls “staying power” – the consistency, commitment, and patience it takes to make real change.
• The Blood Runs Like a River through My Dreams by Nasdjii (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). This memoir by the son of a Native American mother and cowboy father tells in language that is both plain and uncommonly poetic about being stranded between two cultures and overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to become a writer.
• Beyond the Fields by Randy Shaw (University of California). Cesar Chavez failed to build an effective and democratic union that could improve the lives of farm workers, but young people who got their first exposure to organizing through the United Farm Workers experience went on to play an important role in recent attempts to revive the immigrant rights’ movement and empower low-wage workers through campaigns such as Justice for Janitors. Shaw describes the UFW’s successes and demise and provides a “where are they now” look at some of the movement’s alumni.
• The Civil Rights Reader edited by Julie Buckner Armstrong and Amy Schmidt (University of Georgia). This anthology of fiction, essays, speeches, poetry, and other literature is designed for studying the civil rights movement from its roots in the 1800s to the present and includes pieces by many of the best known African Americans.
• Wage Theft in America by Kim Bobo (The New Press). The single largest category of larceny in the United States each year is the billions of dollars stolen from workers by failing to pay them the legal minimum wage, misclassifying them as independent contractors to avoid paying for overtime or the employer share of payroll taxes, or other tactics. Yet, this corporate crime goes largely unpunished. The director of Interfaith Worker Justice documents this abuse and describes in detail what individuals, community organizations, religious groups, and the Obama administration can do about it.
• Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly (The New Press). Why are some people enormously wealthy? Is it because they are more hard working or ingenious than everyone else? Or is it because they have appropriated wealth and knowledge generated by the society as a whole?
• Shades of Justice by Paul Krehbiel (Autumn Leaf Press). A labor activist who has been a blue-collar worker and union staffer gives some of the flavor of the 1960s through a personal memoir of his involvement in the movement against the war in Vietnam.
• The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland (Viking, 2004). This historical novel brings alive the inner life of Emily Carr, an artist best known for her paintings inspired by native totem poles and villages in British Columbia at the beginning of the 1900s. At a time when most of white society was focused on obliterating native culture, Carr struggled to develop a painting style that would do justice to the artistic genius she found in native carvings.
• The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones (HarperOne). This African American activist has emerged as a leading voice for attacking both poverty and climate change by putting millions of people to work greening our economy. He talks in forthright terms about the need to unite white environmentalists and communities of color for a common agenda, gives examples of innovative organizing already going on, and lays out specific policies that can be pursued locally and by the Obama administration.
• Obama’s Challenge by Robert Kuttner (Chelsea Green). With the new U.S. president facing enormous political and economic pressure from corporate special interests, progressives must organize to push an agenda for real change. This economics writer makes an important contribution to the process by laying out a program and how Obama can achieve it.
• Speaking Treason Fluently by Tim Wise (Soft Skull). Wise, who wrote the most insightful commentary during the 2008 presidential elections about the double standards applied to Barack Obama because of race, has compiled his anti-racist writings of the past ten years in this follow-up to his book White Like Me. He consistently makes white readers see their own internalized assumptions in new ways, whether writing about “reverse racism,” class, immigration, profiling, or pop culture. Even sports – noting that many don’t consider Barry Bonds’ records untainted given the steroid era, he asks why baseball records set in Babe Ruth’s time should count without an asterisk given that they were set without facing black or Latino competition and thus can’t be compared to today’s achievements?
• Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan edited by Iraq Veterans Against the War and Aaron Glantz (Haymarket). More than 50 veterans give personal testimony that rarely appears in the U.S. media about the atrocities they saw, racism and sexism in the military, the crisis in veterans’ health care, and corporate war profiteering.
• Holy Roller by Diane Wilson (Chelsea Green). Wilson’s books are a delightful antidote to the homogenization of American culture. Her first, An Unreasonable Woman, told of her odyssey as a shrimp boat operator who took on a global chemical company that was polluting her bay. Her latest tells of her childhood among Holy Rollers in rural Texas. She writes the way people from that time and place talked and thought, giving the reader a total immersion experience.
• Mine Work by Jim Davidson (Utah State University Press, 1999). A gem of a mystery set in a town in the Southwest in the 1950s where a mining company used Navajo labor to break a union organizing drive.
• An Unknown God by Tony Equale ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ). A thoughtful ex-priest who has spent much of his life doing blue-collar work and helping poor people organize critiques the traditions and teachings of the Catholic Church and explores the future of faith in today’s world.
• Understanding the US-Iran Crisis and Ending the Iraq War by Phyllis Bennis (Olive Branch). Two timely and readable pocket-sized primers organized around the questions any layperson would ask.
• The Customer is Always Wrong edited by Jeff Martin (Soft Skull). 21 authors tell brief tales of their worst experiences as retail workers.
• Dance, Nana, Dance by Joe Hayes (Cinco Puntos). A lively bilingual collection of 13 folktales from Cuba with the type of vivid color illustrations books from Cinco Puntos Press typically include.
• Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner (Milkweed). The author of Ordinary Wolves now provides a revealing nonfiction account of his life in Arctic Alaska, complete with stunning photos.
• Depraved Indifference by Patrice Woeppel (iuniverse.com).  The workers’ compensation system does more to protect corporations than injured workers, according to this well-researched analysis that draws on a number of actual cases, including the author’s own injury while working in a hospital. The final chapter gives her prescription for change.
• All You Can Eat by Joel Berg (Seven Stories). An activist gives his view of how hunger in America could be ended under the Obama administration. The cost would equal 2 percent of the net worth of the 400 richest Americans.
• Laid Off, Laid Low edited by Katherine S. Newman (Columbia University Press). Five scholarly essays study the economic, psychological, and political consequences of increased employment insecurity in the U.S.
• Learning from L.A. edited by Kerchner, Menefee-Libey, Mulfinger, and Clayton (Harvard Education Press). This history of education reform efforts in Los Angeles argues that there is a clear trend toward decentralization, standards, choice, and grassroots participation, and that teachers’ collective bargaining must focus more on education quality.
• Reproduce & Revolt edited by Josh MacPhee and Favianna Rodriguez (Soft Skull). A bilingual (English/Spanish) collection of more than 500 radical political graphics that may be reproduced for free.
• The Democrats: A Critical History by Lance Selfa (Haymarket). Argues that the Democratic Party co-opts and derails social movements unless they organize to build grassroots pressure.
• The Accidental American by Rinku Sen with Fekkak Mamdouh (Berrett-Koehler). Mamdouh is an immigrant from Morocco who worked at a restaurant atop the World Trade Center until it was destroyed on 9/11. A union steward before the tragedy, he is co-founder of a national network of restaurant workers and joined with his displaced co-workers to establish a cooperatively owned restaurant in New York. Sen skillfully integrates his personal story with a broader account of the debate over immigration in the U.S.
• The Way We Work edited by Peter Scheckner and M.C. Boyes (Vanderbilt University Press). A new anthology presents 42 short stories, poems, and personal accounts of experiences in today’s American workplace. The jobs represented include office worker, police, firefighter, food processor, factory worker, stripper, construction worker, and many more. The overall impression these pieces leave is of an America where many people are working too many hours and finding it hard to maintain pride in their work as corporate employers treat them as disposable assets and put short-term profits above all else.
• When You Come Home by Nora Eisenberg (Curbstone). This novel deals with the devastating health effects of the first Gulf War on returning U.S. soldiers, generally avoiding polemics and drawing the reader into the lives of two young veterans and their lovers and families.
• Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar (Ibis Editions). This is the first English translation of a well known novel written in 1949 shortly after Israel was established. The author was a soldier in the army that evicted Palestinian families from their villages and burned their homes so they could not return. It describes his emotions and the reactions of other young soldiers as he comes to believe that the evictions are not morally right.
• Allensworth, The Freedom Colony by Alice C. Royal (Heyday). In 1908, a former slave established a town in California’s Central Valley that soon attracted hundreds of African American families who established their own school, businesses, and local government. Today, some of the town has been restored as a state historic park. This attractive book combines photos and text to tell the townspeople’s story in their own words.
• The Transitions Handbook by Rob Hopkins (Green Books/Chelsea Green). Some towns have begun to plan for climate change and a decline in the world’s oil supply. This book defines the crisis, describes some of those towns’ experiences, and suggests steps for starting a local transition initiative.
• Thrillcraft edited by George Wuerthner (Chelsea Green). The companies that profit from motorized recreational vehicles such as ATVs, dune buggies, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, and jet skis have financed and organized political pressure groups to open up more public land and wild areas to be permanently sacrificed to that kind of activity. This large-format coffee table book uses big color photos and angry, well documented essays to argue for an uncompromising response.
• Beyond Bogota by Garry Leech (Beacon). An American journalist ventured into the most dangerous regions of Colombia to interview union organizers, poor coca farmers, guerrillas, and members of the military and provide a dramatic eyewitness account of the so-called “war on drugs” being waged there by the U.S. government.
• Obamanomics by John R. Talbott (Seven Stories). A former investment banker for Goldman Sachs and author of such books as the Coming Crash in the Housing Market explains why he supports what he calls Barack Obama’s “bottom-up prosperity” alternative to trickle-down economics.
• Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off (The New Press). A Canadian journalist looks at where chocolate comes from, how it is produced, who profits from it, and who is exploited and impoverished in the process.
• Dying to Live by Joseph Nevins (City Lights). A well-researched account uses the death of a man crossing the border from Mexico to be reunited with his family as a jumping off point to tell the larger story of the history and current reality of immigration.
• Illegal People by David Bacon (Beacon). A former union organizer shows how current immigration laws are used to exploit immigrant workers and their families.
• Tell Me Another Morning by Zdena Berger (Paris Press). The author was 14 when she was taken to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Her memoir, recently reissued, is written from her point of view at the time, making the experience come painfully alive for the reader.
• When the Prisoners Ran Walpole by Jamie Bissonette (South End). At a time when U.S. prison growth is out of control, this true story about a past experiment sheds light on what could be done. For a brief time in the 1970s, reforms improved conditions in a state prison in Massachusetts and reintegrated more prisoners into society.
• Why America Lost the War on Poverty and How to Win It by Frank Stricker (University of North Carolina). Tracing more than 50 years of history, from the War on Poverty through workfare to Bill Clintons vow to end welfare as we know it, Stricker argues that any serious anti-poverty program must be rooted in good jobs with pay and benefits that support a family.
• Solidarity Divided by Bill Fletcher, Jr., and Fernando Gapasin (University of California). The union movement should not settle for winning gains for workers within the capitalist system but should promote a global vision of an alternative to that system, according to this book, part essay and part memoir, that contains a wide variety of criticisms of SEIU, Change to Win, and the AFL-CIO.
• Race Against Liberalism by David M. Lewis-Colman (University of Illinois). Chronicles historic tension between white liberal leaders of the UAW and independent black movements in the auto industry.
• The Carbon-Free Home by Stephen & Rebekah Hren (Chelsea Green). Detailed, practical ideas for modifications that can be made in traditional homes to reduce fossil fuel use that contributes to climate change.
• The Political Economy of Media by Robert W. McChesney (Monthly Review Press). Collected writings of a leading voice for radical reform of the news media.
• Unafraid by Jeff Golden (www.Unafraidthebook.com). At a time when a new national figure is leading for his party’s presidential nomination by tapping into many Americans’ yearning for a break from conventional politics, this novel evokes the author’s vision of what is possible. His starting point – what if the bullet fired at John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 only wounded him, and in the process gave him a new willingness to take risks for progressive policies and an intense sense of urgency? How might the years since then have been different?
• Swim Against the Current by Jim Hightower with Susan DeMarco (Wiley). The populist with a sense of humor chronicles grassroots activists across the U.S. who have made a difference in their communities.
• Stand Up Straight by Robert Creamer (Seven Locks Press). A long-time political organizer provides nearly 600 pages of thoughtful advice for campaigners of all kinds about how to communicate and organize effectively for progressive issues and candidates.
• Keeping the Promise?: The Debate Over Charter Schools (Rethinking Schools). Charter schools promised to jumpstart new models for education reform at a time when many school systems have not been able to respond with appropriate urgency to children’s needs. Most charter schools are smaller than traditional public schools. Some are operated by profit-making chains. Nearly all are nonunion. This collection of essays examines whether they are fulfilling their promise, and what lessons they are teaching about education policy.
• The Big Squeeze by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf). One of the few labor reporters left at an American newspaper, the New York Times reporters draws on years of interviews to paint a human picture of declining living standards and workers’ rights. He contrasts the Wal-Marting of the economy with the high road he says employers such as Costco have followed. He also proposes reforms for the country, corporations, and unions to ease the squeeze that most workers are facing.
• Tree Barking by Nesta Rovina (Heyday). A home health therapist schooled in South Africa and Israel provides an unvarnished memoir of her work with desperately poor county clients in northern California.
• The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb (Grove). A gritty novel about a Mexican-American teenaged boy in Los Angeles and the people who live in his apartment building.
• Dreams and Shadows by Robin Wright (Penguin Press). A veteran Washington Post correspondent draws on decades of reporting to provide a primer on the recent history and possible future of key countries in the Middle East.
• Linked Labor Histories by Aviva Chomsky (Duke University). New England and Colombia are used as case studies to show that globalization is not new, that its long existence is a major reason for the wealth gap around the world, and that U.S. unions have historically sided with capital against workers in other countries.
• Greening Your Office by Jon Clift and Amanda Cuthbert (Chelsea Green). Practical tips on reducing contributions to global warming.
• The Gum Chewing Rattler by Joe Hayes (Cinco Puntos). A vividly illustrated children’s book about a story a boy tells his mother.
• Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin). The authors of the provocative essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” argue that the environmental movement can’t build a worldwide political majority for sustainable economic and environmental policies if it is seen as trying to stop poor people around the world from improving their standard of living while failing to address basic human needs like good jobs, quality health care, and decent living conditions. Environmental groups should not focus on campaigns to save the whales or the rainforest, and unions should not focus on protecting old-economy jobs, they argue. Instead, they should join forces to push all-out for massive public investment in new forms of green economic development.
• Driven Out by Jean Pfaelzer (Random House). At a time when immigration is once again a hot topic in America, this study details the systematic campaign of terror waged against Chinese immigrants in the western U.S. in the last half of the 1800s, often by white working men whose anger was fueled both by fear of being undercut by cheap labor and resentment of the growing power of big corporations.
• For Jobs and Freedom by Robert H. Zieger (University Press of Kentucky). A 233-page review of the history of African American workers and organized labor since the Civil War. Much of that history has been one of exclusion, although more black workers became part of integrated organizations with the rise of the industrial unions of the CIO.
• Women Behind Bars by Silja J.A. Talvi (Seal Press). The number of women in prison has tripled in the past 30 years. This thorough report by an investigative journalist explores why, while telling human stories of those affected.
• Coal River by Michael Shnayerson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) and Moving Mountains by Penny Loeb (University Press of Kentucky). Two nonfiction accounts by professional journalists describe community struggles against mountaintop removal coal mining by giant corporations in West Virginia. This mining technique has provided a few thousand, mostly nonunion jobs while more labor-intensive and unionized underground mining jobs continue to decline, the landscape is permanently destroyed, and families that have lived in the area for hundreds of years are driven out by flooding, landslides, and pollution of the streams. These books are the nonfiction counterparts to the stunning novel by Ann Pancake, Strange as This Weather Has Been, that was reviewed in a previous edition of WWW.
• The Squandering of America by Robert Kuttner (Knopf). One of the leading economics writers explains how policies of both Republicans and Democrats have hurt working people and proposes alternatives new leaders could adopt.
• Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston (Portfolio). For decades, corporate-funded politicians have railed against “entitlements” for the working poor, the middle class, and the elderly. A long-time New York Times reporter provides chapter and verse about how the real welfare in the U.S. is being collected by big corporations and the rich at everyone else’s expense.
• The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr (Akashic). This novel set in Los Angeles is as dignified and gradually revealing as its main character, a Japanese star in Hollywood’s silent film days.
• Black Glasses Like Clark Kent by Terese Svoboda (Graywolf). A man who served as a military prison guard during the occupation of Japan after World War II began suffering from suicidal depression when news of Abu Ghraib hit the airwaves. Before he died, he asked his writer niece to tell his story.
• The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton (Warner Business Books). Corporations, agencies, and other organizations should establish and enforce explicit policies against abusive behavior, especially by those who have power over others.
• The Surgeons by Charles R. Morris (W.W. Norton). A journalist spent months inside the heart center at one of the top hospitals in New York, observing the work of leading surgeons and in the process learning first-hand about the flaws of the health care system in which they operate.
• Beyond the Green Zone by Dahr Jamail (Haymarket). An independent journalist without the constraints of “embedded” traditional media reporters has made repeated trips to Iraq since the U.S. invasion to give voice to civilians there and to investigate official government claims.
• On the Global Waterfront by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger (Monthly Review Press).  Black longshoremen in Charleston, South Carolina, generated international support as they fought to preserve their union despite vicious physical and legal attacks.
• The Great Strikes of 1877 edited by David O. Stowell (University of Illinois). Essays by six academics look at different aspects of historic uprisings that took place across the U.S. in 1877 and often had serious racial overtones.
• Class and the Color Line by Joseph Gerteis (Duke University). In the late 19^th century the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement sometimes built interracial coalitions and sometimes didn’t, depending on local economic and political conditions.
• Daring to Care by Susan Gelfand Malka (University of Illinois Press). A professor and former nurse examines how changes in feminist thought since the early 1960s have affected nurses’ goals and expectations.
• The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin). Few in America realize that the destruction of Dust Bowl communities in the 1930s was a man-made disaster, not primarily a natural one, as the land was torn up for new crops produced with mechanization, leaving it vulnerable to wind storms. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought farmers together to try to restore and protect the land. This book tells the story of people who stayed and survived rather than making the trek to California.
• The Associates by Richard Rayner (W.W. Norton). Domination of American economic and political life by a corporate elite goes back a long way. This account profiles the no-holds-barred greed of four men who dominated the development of California in the 1800s – Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins.
• Workplace Chemistry by Meg A. Bond (UPNE). A professor spent years consulting for a New England chemical manufacturer that was grappling with organizational change to promote diversity and combat discrimination in all its forms.
• Comfortably Numb by Charles Barber (Pantheon). Americans who make up 6% of the world’s population buy at least two-thirds of the world’s drugs directed at mental health, drug companies spend almost twice as much on marketing as they do on research, and 85% of people with serious mental illness can’t afford the treatment they need.
• The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Dr. Devra Davis (Basic Books). Pointing out that one in two men and one in three women living today will have cancer of some type, this masterpiece by the head of environmental oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute provides in one readable account the facts about how environmental, consumer product, and work-related causes of cancer have been deliberately covered up for decades while the public is distracted by P.R. campaigns posing as a “War on Cancer.” Davis asks whether emerging potential hazards such as cell phones or Ritalin will be the next examples of exposures that are reassuringly pronounced safe until it is too late. Woven into the book is the story of Davis’ own parents who died of cancer after years of exposure to chemicals in a steel town in Pennsylvania.
• Global Unions edited by Kate Bronfenbrenner (Cornell University Press). Ten scholars present frank research on the opportunities and obstacles illustrated by recent efforts at transnational union collaboration in various parts of the world, with examples drawn from agriculture, longshoring, manufacturing,  food processing, and SEIU’s global partnerships in service sectors.
• Army of None by Aimee Allison and David Solnit (Seven Stories Press). This practical guide shows how the U.S. military uses access to public school classrooms to make false promises to children in order to get them to enlist – from college tuition benefits a majority of recruits will never receive to empty assurances that they aren’t likely to be sent to Iraq. As part of its $4 billion annual recruiting effort, the military has created a database on 30 million targeted 16 to 25 year olds that includes information about their family, ethnic background, work and school history, and much more. The book describes and provides resources for a variety of successful local tactics that have been used to challenge and counteract the increasingly desperate military effort to draw young people in.
• Surviving Iraq by Elise Forbes Tripp (Interlink).  The fact that the 30 men and women who have served in Iraq and are interviewed in this book have the full range of political views makes this oral history a particularly powerful statement about the brutal effect of the invasion on all concerned.
• Selling Anxiety by Caryl Rivers (UPNE). The news media bounce from one scare story for women to the next, many centered on the horrible things that may happen to their children while they are out working. A journalism professor persuasively describes the sexism and pseudo-science behind most media coverage of women and asks why the real economic and social issues women face are ignored.
• The Argument by Matt Bai (Penguin Press). A New York Times Magazine writer contends that it’s not enough for progressives to remind working Americans of economic pressures they feel in their daily lives. Activists must also put forward a credible argument or analysis about why working people are having to work so much harder to keep their head above water. Republicans have advanced a coherent argument ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, while Democrats have not done so since the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. Bai got inside access to liberal billionaires, bloggers, MoveOn staff, and others who aspire to remake progressive politics, but didn’t find a more developed argument there than among traditional Democratic politicians.
• The Real All Americans by Sally Jenkins (Doubleday). In the early 1900s, shortly after the U.S. military finished taking over Native American land, a former Army officer set up a boarding school in Carlisle, PA, for the sons and daughters of tribal leaders. The school eventually developed one of America’s top teams in the newly emerging sport of football, introducing the passing game and innovative offensive plays that went beyond the rugby-like, straight-ahead running that dominated until that time. After defeating top teams such as Harvard and Yale, Carlisle reached its sports pinnacle by beating Army’s team from West Point.
• Double Crossing by Eve Tal (Cinco Puntos). A first-rate story for junior high or high school students about a Jewish girl from Russia who immigrated to America with her father.
• ABeCedarios by Cynthia Weill and K.B. Basseches (Cinco Puntos). This beautiful book teaches children their ABCs in both English and Spanish, using as illustrations wooden creatures carved by artisans in Oaxaca.
• Reading, Writing, and Rising Up by Linda Christensen (Rethinking Schools). Practical ideas, experiences, and readings for helping diverse working class students learn to write about their world.
• More Unequal by Michael D. Yates (NYU Press). Fourteen useful essays challenge ways of thinking about class in America that most of us learn in school and from the news media.
• The Cost of Privilege by Chip Smith (Camino). A left working group has produced a textbook on white supremacy and racism that begins with a historical review and ends with a discussion of what readers can do.
• Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore (The New Press). The former co-editor of the magazine Punk Planet explores efforts by big corporations to exploit independent and underground youth culture for marketing purposes.
• Going Down Jericho Road by Michael K. Honey (W.W. Norton). This thoroughly researched story of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that was Martin Luther King’s last campaign recalls a time when unions like AFSCME were closely tied to the civil rights movement’s moral crusade.
• Monongah by Davitt McAteer (West Virginia University Press). One of the nation’s leading experts on coal mine health and safety spent decades researching the 1907 mine disaster in West Virginia that killed nearly 500 men and boys. Like most mine deaths that occur today, these were preventable if the company had put safety first.
• Death at the Old Hotel by Con Lehane (St. Martin’s Minotaur). A contemporary murder mystery whose heroes are Irish reformers fighting union and Mob corruption in New York hotels. The author draws on his experience both as a union staffer and as a bartender in New York.
• The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor by Les Leopold (Chelsea Green). A detailed biography of Tony Mazzocchi, a longtime leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, tells how he inspired a generation of occupational health and safety activists, pioneered labor-environmental alliances, pushed for a renewed focus on helping nonunion workers organize, and fought for fundamental health care reform.
• Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake (Shoemaker & Hoard). An engrossing novel that tells the story of a family whose lives, like the West Virginia mountains they love, are torn up by strip mining. It’s a book that could only be written so well by someone who grew up in Appalachia and spent many hours interviewing local people before writing.
• Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson (Clarion). A well crafted, 270-page historical novel for junior high and high school readers that focuses on two children in their early teens who are caught up in the great textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. The author makes the characters real by giving them faults and dilemmas instead of turning them into one-dimensional heroes.
• Highway 99 edited by Stan Yogi, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida (Heyday). An outstanding 500-page, multicultural collection of poems, stories, and excerpts from longer works about life in California’s Central Valley.
• Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant (Crown ). This book about the white, nonunion working poor in the author’s hometown of Winchester, Virginia has plenty to offend everyone. He argues that instead of alienating these natural allies by pushing issues like gun control, middle-class urban liberals should become “leftneck” organizers who reach out to “educate” working class whites about how they are being exploited by big corporations and Republican politicians.
• Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation by Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp (Harvard Education Press). Unions in many service fields are struggling with how to maintain essential workers’ rights while at the same time meeting the desire of both the public and workers themselves to improve the quality of services the community receives. This book describes how progressive leaders of the Denver teachers’ union grappled with proposals to tie salaries to evaluated performance, professional development efforts, willingness to work with at-risk populations, and student achievement.
• The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster). An editor for Esquire reads that between one-third and one-half of Americans believe that every word in the Bible is literally true – and decides to spend a year following the Good Book’s dictates to the letter. Below the surface of his quirky, irreverent humor, Jacobs begins to actually learn something about religious history and explores how the same holy book is a reference for both conservative and progressive activists.
• Disability and Business by Charles A. Riley II (University Press of New England). Setting aside issues of ethics and morality, this professor of business journalism argues that corporations should employ and market to people with disabilities as a way to increase profits.
• U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition by Kim Moody (Verso). One of the founders of the publication, Labor Notes, argues that the decline in living standards and rights for working people will be reversed not by projects such as Change to Win that are led by national organizations but instead by local rank-and-file union reform movements and worker centers that support immigrant organizing.
• My Daughter’s Eyes by Annecy Baez (Curbstone). 14 interrelated stories about young Dominican women in the Bronx. One in particular stands out: a simple story about two little girls who report sexual abuse to their mother only to have her protect the abuser.
• Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States edited by Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto (Duke University). A comprehensive reader with 26 essays that examine in more than 670 pages the issue of reparations to African Americans for slavery and segregation, from the reasoning behind it to possible ways to implement it to ideas for building a movement to achieve it.
• The Politics of Immigration by Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson (Monthly Review Press). This well-researched, factual question-and-answer guide is a valuable reference book on the major issues involving immigration and changes in U.S. policy that have been proposed.
• “They Take Our Jobs” by Aviva Chomsky (Beacon). Gives facts and analysis to challenge 21 common assertions about the impact of immigration and what should be done about it.
• Iran on the Brink by Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian (Pluto). Two Swedish journalists did in-depth reporting in Iran with a focus on how domestic and international issues look to working people there and why growing unemployment and poverty have sparked a new workers’ movement. The result is an exceptionally informative source for anyone looking to understand events in Iran behind the western headlines about nuclear weapons.
• Why is Crater Lake So Blue? by Michael LaLumiere (Stagger Lee Books). This well written coming-of-age novel about a young man coming to grips with romantic love, workplace ethics, his relationship with his father, and other issues draws on the author’s experience as a seasonal maintenance worker at Crater Lake National Park. Especially suited to high school students.
• The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (Simon & Schuster). This complex murder mystery combines suspense, engaging characters, and vivid descriptions of Canada’s remote northern territory in 1867.
• Building Powerful Community Organizations by Michael Jacoby Brown (Long Haul Press). A veteran organizer provides more than 375 pages of detailed nuts and bolts on every aspect of community organizing.
• Do It Yourself edited by the Trapese Collective (Pluto). This thoughtful book edited by three young British activists provides concrete, practical ideas for those who want to “act locally” and not wait for big institutions to lead,.
• We Make Change by Kristin Layng Szakos and Joe Szakos (Vanderbilt University). Fourteen profiles and dozens of other interviews with community organizers provide an introduction to the work they do and the motivations that keep them going.
• State of the Unions by Philip Dine (McGraw Hill). The veteran labor reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch argues that organized labor’s image is declining, in large part because of its own failure to communicate effectively at both the national and local levels. He also blasts the split between the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, calling the disagreements between them “sophomoric spats.”
• The Black Worker edited by Eric Arnesen (Praeger). A collection of enlightening essays explores many of the recurring issues throughout history involving black workers, including discrimination, gender, migration from the South, strikebreaking in the early years of union organizing, and splits between black workers and some more established African Americans.
• Blood Passion by Scott Martelle (Rutgers University). An L.A. Times reporter applies his skills to telling the story of the armed struggle at Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914 between coalfield families and the Rockefeller mining interests. One difference from previous accounts is that Martelle sees the miners not as victims of violence but as immigrant freedom fighters who gave as good as they got in their struggle for justice.
• Rethinking Our Classrooms, Vol 1 (Rethinking Schools). A newly revised and expanded edition of the classic compilation of proven ideas for “teaching for equity and justice.” Some of the new material includes essays on teaching about science and the environment, immigration, military recruitment, and gay and lesbian issues.
• Califauna edited by Terry Beers and Emily Elrod (Heyday). A collection of short writings or excerpts of longer pieces about animals and birds commonly found in California and other parts of the U.S. Includes factual descriptions of each as well as selected artwork.
• The Guardians by Ana Castillo (Random House). A sensitive but ultimately not hopeful novel about hard lives on the U.S. side of the Mexican border.
• Teeth by Aracelis Girmay (Curbstone). Poems that span cultures from Africa to the Caribbean to the U.S.
• Transborder Lives by Lynn Stephen (Duke University). An academic study follows indigenous Mexicans from two Oaxacan towns – one Mixtec and the other Zapotec – who periodically migrate to California and Oregon to work.  It also examines grassroots organizing projects with which they get involved.
• Empire’s Workshop by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan). Reviews the history of U.S. involvement in Latin America from Gunboat Diplomacy to the Good Neighbor Policy to the World Bank.
• The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn (Verso). A revised and updated version of on-the-scene reporting on the war in Iraq by the Middle East correspondent of the British paper, the Independent. Contains hundreds of revealing details, including Donald Rumsfeld’s proposal early in the invasion to appoint Rudy Giuliani as mayor of Baghdad.
• A Hard Journey by James J. Lorence (University of Illinois). A biography of Don West, longtime radical organizer in Appalachia, explores many of the choices and challenges faced by left activists from the 1930s through the McCarthy era.
• San Francisco’s International Hotel by Estella Habal (Temple University). Recounts the renowned nine-year campaign by Filipinos in the 1970s to try to save low-income housing for the elderly from destruction.
• Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate by Michael D. Yates (Monthly Review). A left economist and his wife travel around the U.S., stopping to work along the way. The book is an interesting combination of travel guide and reporting on the state of the country.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded edited by Incite (South End Press). Poses the question of whether foundation funded, nonprofit 501(c)(3) groups by their nature do more to limit or stimulate self-sustaining grassroots movements for social change.
• Thanks for the Memories by Jane Mersky Leder (Praeger).The role of women in the workforce and support units for the military during World War II had a lasting effect on cultural patterns involving love and sex, according to this account that profiles a variety of women and men who lived through that era.
• Ludlow by David Mason (Red Hen). A historical novel about the massacre of 18 men, women, and children of coal mining families at a mine owned by the Rockefellers in Colorado in 1914. Written in free verse, adding a poetic quality to the prose.
• Latina Activists Across Borders by Milagros Pena (Duke University). Profiles women’s non-governmental organizations in El Paso/Ciudad Juarez and in Michoacan, Mexico.
• Understanding Youth by Michael J. Nakkula and Eric Toshalis (Harvard Education Press). A discussion of the developmental issues faced by adolescents, aimed at educators, social workers, and others who work with them.
• Collateral Damage by Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner (Harvard Education Press). An analysis of how high-stakes testing hurts rather than helps the nation’s school children.
• A Young People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (Seven Stories). Two volumes that provide a radical perspective for students on American history. Uses left vocabulary that a teacher would have to help interpret. Some adults will find this account to be a useful summary.
• Sin Patron by Lavaca (Haymarket). Stories about and interviews with workers in Argentina who took over their factories rather than let them close. A companion to the documentary film, The Take.
• Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike by Deepa Kumar (University of Illinois). On the 10^th anniversary of the UPS strike that was the most successful national worker action in a generation, a communications professor analyzes the methods used by the union to build public support, the failure of the company to respond effectively, and the frames the news media put on the story as the campaign progressed.
• Heat by George Monbiot (South End). As it has become harder for corporate interests to argue that global warming does not exist, a fallback message has been that doing anything about it will cause too much disruption in lifestyles that depend on energy use. Monbiot puts forward a concrete plan to cut emissions and discusses frankly what will and will not have to change.
• The Education of Ronald Reagan by Thomas Evans (Columbia University). Ronald Reagan as the hired voice of corporate America was the creation of Lemuel Boulware, GE's labor relations strategist, who paid the actor to spearhead a carefully designed campaign to win the hearts and minds of American workers. This history, told by a conservative Republican admirer, is thought provoking for progressives trying to rebuild a political majority after decades of being on the defensive.
• Understories by Jake Kosek (Duke University). A readable discussion of how race and class underlie environmental issues, focused on battles over the forests of northern New Mexico.
• Workers and the Wild by Lawrence M. Lipin (Univ. of Illinois). Using the Oregon union movement as a case study, the author examines how labor’s unconditional support for development to create jobs began to change in the early 1900s as working men and women came to value outdoor recreation and the conservation of public lands.
• River of Renewal by Stephen Most (Oregon Historical Society Press). An historical account of the interaction between native peoples, white settlers, and the environment, brought up to date with a profile of recent organized efforts to help native people, ranchers, and commercial fishing interests find common ground.
• The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell (Pantheon). A journalist who was born after the war in Vietnam travels to that country with his father who fought there. The book chronicles the debates they have and their interactions with Vietnamese of both generations.
• The Bee Tree by Stephen Buchmann and Diana Cohn (Cinco Puntos). A beautifully illustrated children’s book about a boy in Malaysia who undergoes a rite of passage to adulthood by climbing a tall tree by moonlight as part of a honey-gathering ritual.
• Los Angeles Noir and New Orleans Noir (Akashic). Two more in the series of noir anthologies based in a particular city.
• No Child Left Behind and the Public Schools by Scott Franklin Abernathy (University of Michigan). Analyzes the impact of the Bush education policy and the difficulty of measuring effective education through standardized tests.
• Labor, Free and Slave by Bernard Mandel (University of Illinois). Reissue of a 1955 study of the relationship between abolitionists and the emerging white labor movement before the Civil War.
• Closed for Repairs by Nancy Alonso (Curbstone). Eleven short vignettes of Cuban life today that use equal-opportunity irony to show how working people there cope with the effects of the American embargo as well as the Cuban bureaucracy.
• Mecca and Main Street by Geneive Abdo (Oxford). Many American Muslims have become more committed to and public about their faith since 9/11, according to this author who visited Muslim communities in different parts of the U.S.
• Talking Past Each Other by David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Ruy Teixeira (Economic Policy Institute). Useful tips on how to talk about economic issues based on focus groups and polling.
• Dad, Jackie, and Me by Myron Uhlberg (Peachtree). A children’s book in which the child’s father is deaf and is a big fan of the baseball player Jackie Robinson. Based on the author’s actual experience as the hearing son of two deaf parents.
• Femininity in Flight by Kathleen M. Barry (Duke Univ.). There was a time when flight attendants were required to wear mini-skirts and were fired if they married, passed the age of 32, or exceeded a strict weight limit. This book tells the fascinating story of how the way flight attendants have seen themselves, been marketed, and have organized has reflected shifting social trends regarding the role of women in American society.
• Best Care Anywhere by Phillip Longman (PoliPointPress). In looking for models for a health care system that provides affordable, quality care to all, we don’t just have to look to other countries – we could start by learning lessons from the successes of the Veterans Administration hospital system.
• Writing for Their Lives edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Univ. of Illinois). A moving collection of fiction and nonfiction writing by prisoners on death row and by prison workers and anti-death penalty activists.
• What Lies Beneath (South End). A passionate look at what has happened in New Orleans since Katrina, from the official response to efforts at community organizing.
• Design for Ecological Democracy by Randolph T. Hester (MIT). A beautifully presented masterpiece that cites existing examples to show how cities can make changes to enhance community, quality of life, and environmental protection.
• Coming to Terms with Nature edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Monthly Review). 20 essays that look at the connections between ecological crisis, globalization, technology, and consumerism. Chapters on working class movements and environmentalism; development and the environment in China, Africa, and Latin America; and more.
• Since Sliced Bread edited by Don Stillman (Chelsea Green). More than 22,000 people responded when SEIU invited working Americans to submit ideas for improving the economy. This book, illustrated with photos by Earl Dotter, presents the results.
• Urban Schools, Public Will by Norm Fruchter (Teachers College Press). Recounts reform efforts in several school districts that have made progress in closing the achievement gap for poor students of color.
• Just Call Me Mike by Mike Farrell (Akashic). A down-to-earth autobiography by the former TV star of MASH and Providence who has used his celebrity to contribute to a broad range of progressive causes at home and abroad.
• Meanwhile Take My Hand by Kirmen Uribe (Graywolf). Poems by a leading Basque poet.
• Cowboy in Caracas by Charles Hardy (Curbstone). At a time when many analysts predict that Venezuela will be one of the Bush administration’s next military targets, a former Catholic priest from Wyoming who spent eight years living in a poor Venezuelan barrio there describes the conditions that have produced popular support for President Hugo Chavez.
• Is Iraq Another Vietnam? by Robert K. Brigham (PublicAffairs). Partisans on both sides, from labor opponents of the war on Iraq to proponents such as John McCain, cite America’s experience in Vietnam to bolster their case. A Vassar professor looks carefully at the actual similarities and differences between the two wars and in the process provides a useful short analysis of both. One key conclusion is that military might ultimately cannot resolve fundamental political and economic issues.
• Iraq: A War (Olive Branch Press). We’ve all seen images of the war but when many of them are assembled in this compilation of photos by Associated Press the effect is to crystallize the horror and futility of the continuing invasion.
• Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal by Anthony Arnove (Metropolitan). Argues that peace and stability cannot be established in Iraq as long as the U.S. invasion continues.
• Illusions of Security by Maureen Webb (City Lights). Documents how 9/11 has been used as an excuse by the government to take away civil liberties guaranteed by the U.S. constitution, without increasing citizens’ security.
• Everybody Was Black Down There by Robert H. Woodrum (Univ. of Georgia). The failure of the United Mine Workers in Alabama to take a strong stand against racism from the New Deal to the present contributed to the union’s decline.
• Black Milwaukee by Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Univ. of Illinois). This is an updated edition of the 1985 study that analyzes the development of the urban African American working class, using one city as an in-depth case study.
• On The Picket Line by Mary E. Triece (Univ. of Illinois). Working class women developed their own tactics and leadership styles to challenge economic injustice and discrimination during the Great Depression. This study looks, for example, at the way female organizers often used a more personal speaking style to connect with audiences.
• Gendering Labor History by Alice Kessler-Harris (Univ. of Illinois). 17 essays that examine the impact of gender on work, social policy, and working class culture.
• My Body Politic by Simi Linton (University of Michigan). A must-read autobiography by a woman whose legs were paralyzed in a car accident on her way to an anti-war demonstration during the Vietnam War. Through her warmly engaging, honest, and often humorous account of her own life and the experiences of friends and colleagues, Linton increases the reader’s sensitivity to the obstacles people with disabilities face at work and in everyday life. She asks why their struggles for more equitable and inclusive social policies are often ignored by progressive activists who challenge other kinds of discrimination.
• Strike! by Julius G. Getman (Plain View Press). The rhetorical sounding title doesn’t do justice to this entertaining and insightful novel about a paperworkers’ strike in a small town in Maine in the late 1980s. Gives a rare inside view of human dynamics inside a local union as the decline in the strength of the industrial labor movement is underway.
• Red Stick Men by Tim Parrish (University Press of Mississippi). Nine short stories describe working class characters in the shadow of the oil industry in Baton Rouge who keep their humanity despite low wages, layoffs, war, pollution, and other challenges.
• Communities Without Borders by David Bacon (Cornell). Photos and text let immigrant workers tell their own stories of how they maintain communities and movements that transcend political borders.
• Hadi Never Died by Abdullah Muhsin and Alan Johnson (Trades Union Congress). Iraqi unionists were brutally persecuted under Saddam Hussein and continue to face anti-labor policies under the current government. This tells the story of the Iraqi union movement and one of its leaders who was tortured and murdered in 2005.
• The Spirit of Disobedience by Curtis White (PoliPoint). Out-of-the-box musings by a social critic who in the tradition of Thoreau takes a step back and asks us where we are trying to go as individuals and as a society
• Immigrant Students and Literacy by Gerald Campano (Teachers College Press). Uses the author’s experiences as a teacher in an elementary school where children spoke at least 14 different languages to show how literacy can be improved by a curriculum that draws on students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences.
• Talkin Black Talk edited by H. Samy Alim and John Baugh (Teachers College Press).
• Black language is seen not as an obstacle to overcome but a cultural resource to be respected in this collection of essays on education that includes descriptions of successful classroom approaches.
• The Ten Minute Activist by the Mission Collective (Nation Books). A compilation of small decisions individuals can make to live in a more ecologically correct way.
• A Common Thread by Beth English (University of Georgia). Tells the history of the shift of the New England textile industry to the South, with a particular focus on one company.
• Tim Hector: A Caribbean Radical’s Story by Paul Buhle (University Press of Mississippi). While focusing on the life of long-time leader for self-determination and social justice in Antigua and throughout the Caribbean, Buhle also provides a broader history of workers’ and progressive movements in the region.
• Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution by Elena Poniatowska (Cinco Puntos). An insightful essay shedding light on Mexico’s cultural roots by one of the country’s leading writers accompanies archival photos.
• Cross-X by Joe Miller (Farrar Straus Giroux). The eye-opening story of a groundbreaking debate team at a poor black high school in Kansas City that not only overcomes the odds against it but begins to challenge racism and classism in the debate community and beyond.
• Not Quite White by Matt Wray (Duke University). A monograph that explores the early history of the stigmatizing of poor rural whites as “white trash” by dominant elites protecting their own status.
• Wisdom for a Livable Planet by Carl N. McDaniel (Trinity University). Profiles eight environmental activists, each engaged in a different way or from a different angle. The net effect is a useful overview of many of the ecological problems we face.
• Lions Don’t Eat Us by Constance Quarterman Bridges (Graywolf). Poems that bring to life stories from the author’s family whose African American and Native American roots go back many generations.
• Tale of 2Cities by Heather Woodbury (Semiotext(e)/MIT). A novel about L.A. and New York developed over time through improvisational theater performances. The style is intriguing although such topics as 9/11 or the Dodgers’ destruction of Mexican housing to build a stadium may seem familiar to some.
• Blood Money by T. Christian Miller (Little, Brown). A militant protest by oil unions in Iraq against an attempt by Halliburton to import cheaper labor from the Philippines is just one of the stories recounted in this comprehensive review of rampant corporate greed in the so-called “reconstruction” that has wasted billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, cost thousands of lives, and failed to provide Iraqi communities with basic services.
• In Conflict by Yvonne Latty (PoliPointPress). The stories of 25 U.S. veterans of the war in Iraq, told in their own words. An unusual compilation in that they were chosen because they have a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints on the war.
• A Little Piece of Ground by Elizabeth Laird (Haymarket). A novel for junior high and high school students about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who lives under Israeli control on the West Bank.
• Wartime Shipyard by Katherine Archibald (Univ. of Illinois). Reprint of a 1947 book by a woman who spent two years working in an Oakland shipyard during World War II. As a chronicle of the obstacles faced by women, African Americans, and “Okies” from the South, this account is a useful reminder of discrimination in the union movement that still must be overcome.
• Home Ground edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney (Trinity University). Forty-five writers provide mini-essays on more than 850 expressions and terms for features of America’s physical landscape. A real find for lovers of language and those who want to maintain a sense of place and connection to the land.
• Jacked by Nomi Prins (PoliPointPress). In conversational style, a former Goldman Sachs manager compiles in one place the way working people she met around the country are being hurt by Bush era policies.
• Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell (Beacon). Shows the effects on local businesses and working people of the shift to mega-retail chains and details how nearly 200 big-box developments have been stopped by local coalitions. Discusses local policies that can promote strong communities.
• The Great Risk Shift by Jacob S. Hacker (Oxford University). Details the systematic shift of risk from corporations to individuals and proposes solutions.
• Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey J. Kaye (Hill & Wang). Tells the story not only of the early American radical himself but of how he has been referred to and used in the two hundred years since. In the process, the author provides a useful tour through American political history from a progressive perspective.
• There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires (Routledge). A compilation of 14 chapters looking at issues of race and class in the New Orleans region before and after Hurricane Katrina.
• State of Working America 2006-2007 by Economic Policy Institute. The most useful resource for facts about the economic situation of working people. Much of the material is available online at www.StateOfWorkingAmerica.org.
• Breeding Bin Ladens by Zachary Shore (Johns Hopkins). Drawing on interviews with moderate Muslims living in Europe, Shore finds that Western regimes have failed to understand the ambivalence many Muslims feel about the consumerism, inequality, and war-based foreign policy they find in European and American culture.
• All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones (HarperCollins). While most books about Washington DC focus on politicians, spies, and star reporters, this collection of 14 short stories illuminates the lives and communities of black DC families struggling to achieve the American dream.
• The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (Harcourt). Walked across Afghanistan in 2002, months after the U.S. invasion.
• God’s Politics by Jim Wallis (Harper). A progressive religious leader argues that the left has made a major mistake by insisting that faith be separated from politics
• Blind into Baghdad by James Fallows (Vintage). Before Bush invaded Iraq, Fallows wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly citing experts who predicted that an invasion would backfire. He has written a series of additional articles since then analyzing how and why the war has failed. In addition, he has gathered expert opinion on the risks involved in potential military action against Iran. This book is an edited compilation of those articles.
• Screwed by Thom Hartmann (Berrett-Koehler). The Air America talk show host draws on U.S. history as well as current events to document how public policy once helped create the middle class and is now being used to destroy it.
• Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan). Using a different name and a made-up resume full of white-collar qualifications, the author of Nickel and Dimed looks for a middle-class job and finds that the American dream is hard to achieve in today’s economy.
• Cable News Confidential by Jeff Cohen (PoliPointPress). The cofounder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) tells all about his experiences as a pundit and producer for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC.
• Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines, and Close Sesame by Nuruddin Farah (Graywolf). Reissue of a trilogy of novels by an exiled Somalian novelist.
• Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism by bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains (South End). A conversation about the possibilities and challenges of a movement that unites African Americans and Latinos.
• Why Monkeys Live in Trees by Raouf Mama (Curbstone). Written versions of memorable oral folk tales from Benin in western Africa.
• The Greening of Ben Brown by Michael Strelow ((Hawthorne). A unique novel to savor not so much for its quirky plot as its masterfully poetic writing style and rich, often humorous detail about characters in a small Oregon town. The main character is a utility worker who suffers a major electrical shock on the job, leading to dramatic change for him and the town where he settles.
• Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos (Harcourt). A novel that teeters between hope and inevitable disaster as it portrays the human reality of coming of age in ethnic working class Detroit as the transition begins from industrial jobs to a low-wage service economy, complete with an attempted 1930s style sitdown strike by local mall workers.
• Made in China by Pun Ngai (Duke University). Who are the workers in China’s exploding industrial sector? A professor spent eight months working in an electronics factory, living in a dormitory, and learning about the young women who have come from farm communities to power the global economy.
• Mission Rejected by Peter Laufer (Chelsea Green). Poignant personal stories of U.S. soldiers who have refused to continue to participate in the war in Iraq.
• Ready, Set, Talk! By Ellen Ratner and Kathie Scarrah (Chelsea Green). Practical tips for using talk radio, TV, and the internet in campaigns.
• Teaching Defiance by Michael Newman (Jossey-Bass). Thoughts and practical stories about adult education that helps people work for positive change.
• Work Songs by Ted Gioia (Duke University). Throughout history people around the world have sung while they worked – but in the 21^st century workplace they are more likely to listen to others’ music if they have music at all.
• Challenging the Chip edited by Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld, and David Naguib Pellow (Temple University). A comprehensive look at the effect of the electronics industry on labor rights and environmental health throughout the world.
• Traveler’s Literary Companion series (Whereabouts Press). Each book in this series is a compilation of short stories that takes place in a particular country. An effort is made to represent different regions within each country to reflect cultural variations.
• Jobs Aren’t Enough by Roberta Rehner Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong (Temple University). Reports on a five-year study in five cities documenting that jobs alone will not open doors to economic stability for families facing poor housing, schools, health care, and other obstacles.
• Dreaming at the Gates of Fury by Alexander Taylor (Azul Editions). Collected poems about love and politics by the cofounder of Curbstone Press.
• Rethinking Global Security edited by Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro (Rutgers University). Ten essays on how the media and popular culture are used to maintain an atmosphere of fear.
• American Methods by Kristian Williams (South End). From time to time, scandals such as Abu Ghraib hit the news media. Williams argues that these examples of U.S. use of torture are not exceptions but the product of ongoing policies.
• Railroading Economics by Michael Perelman (Monthly Review). Capitalists have long promoted the myth of “free markets” while supporting government intervention that benefits them.
• No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart by Tom Slee (Between the Lines). What provides the best path for consumers in an age of corporate power – individual choice or collective action?
• The Small-Mart Revolution by Michael H. Shuman (Berrett-Koehler). Argues that the “bigger is better” model of corporate globalization is obsolete and that locally owned small businesses are gaining ground. Tells what consumers can do to help.
• Tools of the Trade by Labor Occupational Health Program at University of California, Berkeley. A 74-page handbook for action on job safety and health.
• Fast Boat to China by Andrew Ross (Pantheon). At a time when most Americans know little about the world’s most populous country, the author spent a year in China documenting how workers everywhere are losing in the age of globalization.
• The Line Between Us by Bill Bigelow (Rethinking Schools, 2006).  A high school teacher who is a leading education reform activist presents field-tested ideas and materials for stimulating critical thinking about Mexican immigration and border issues.
• All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity by Robert W. Fuller (Berrett-Koehler). Many people today are aware of racism and sexism, but few think about “rankism” – the often subtle denial of dignity and empowerment based on people’s rank or socioeconomic status. This book identifies the phenomenon and envisions how workplaces, health care, education, and other institutions could be organized to recognize everyone’s dignity.
• L.A. Story by Ruth Milkman (Russell Sage). Long a stronghold of anti-union corporate interests, Los Angeles has lost its industrial base and seen a major influx of undocumented immigrants believed by many to be unorganizable – yet it has seen a surge in unionization that may hold lessons for the rest of the country.
• When the War Came Home by Stacy Bannerman (Continuum). After a 43-year-old reservist was called up and sent to Iraq, his anti-war wife became a leader of Military Families Speak Out. Her story grapples with the issue of what it means to “support our troops” with a depth few people experience.
• Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes edited by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. Nine essays by prominent Native Americans about the conquest of the West, drawing on tribal memories and accounts from that time.
• Call Me Henri by Lorraine Lopez (Curbstone). Why are kids in the inner city really up against? This novel for young people answers that question while telling an engaging story.
• Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday). A clever satiric novel about an African American “nomenclature consultant” hired to help a town decide on a new name.
• All Together Now by Jared Bernstein (Berrett-Koehler). Progressives know what they are against. This is a short, readable attempt to identify a program progressives can be for. The issue, Bernstein says, is whether America will have an economic program based on “You’re On Your Own” (YOYO) or “We’re In This Together” (WITT).
• Future Hype by Bob Seidensticker (Berrett-Koehler). A former Microsoft manager argues that many of the commonly accepted beliefs about how technology is changing our world at an unprecedented pace are myths.
• Official Versions by Mark Pawlak (Hanging Loose Press). Prose poems that sharpen the absurdities of current political and commercial life in America.
• Talking Right by Geoffrey Nunberg (Public Affairs). An analysis of how the right has understand the use of framing and language better than progressives have.
• Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American by Shehong Chen (University of Illinois). Describes how Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s developed their new communities and new identity in America.
• 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right (EarthWorks Press). 192 pages packed with ideas and resources to suit activists with a wide variety of strategic preferences. There’s now only one page about the importance of unions; hopefully, future editions will provide some detail on why and how progressives should support worker organizing.
• For All These Rights by Jennifer Klein (Princeton). As the system of private health and retirement benefits is collapsing, this history describes how it was created in the first place after World War II.
• Dirt Cheap by Lyn Miller-Machmann (Curbstone). Echoes of Ibsen’s enemy of the people as a Connecticut professor discovers that chemical pollution is the cause of leukemia for himself and others in his community.
• A People’s History of the Civil War by David Williams (The New Press). A counterpoint to the many accounts of the war that focus on military strategy at the top, this history tells how the war was experienced by working people on both sides who bore the brunt and suffered in the aftermath.
• Chicken by Steve Striffler (Yale University). Striffler worked in a chicken processing plant as part of his research into the poultry industry which he argues harms farmers, workers, and consumers as it now operates. His reporting includes a close-up look at the interactions between immigrant workers and southern towns where many chicken plants are located.
• The Global Class War by Jeff Faux (Wiley) argues that “the majority of ordinary citizens of Canada, Mexico, and the United States have more in common with each other than they do with the transnational elites who now govern their nations.” Faux examines the actual impact of NAFTA and proposes a new continental democracy.
• The Betrayal of Work by Beth Shulman (New Press). A new paperback edition of the book that examines the social impact of having one in four workers – 30 million Americans – paid wages below the poverty line.
• Conned by Sasha Abramsky and Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer (New Press). Mauer’s updated book examines the growth of the largest prison industry in the world, while Abramsky’s shows how denying the vote to four million mostly poor, black, and brown ex-prisoners who have served their time makes the difference in many local, state, and national elections.
• The Disposable American by Louis Uchitelle (Knopf). A probe into the causes and human effects of layoffs in today’s economy, challenging the myths that training programs are the principal solution and that so-called downsizing is just a necessary if painful step toward creation of more and better jobs.
• Jane Fonda’s War by Mary Hershberger (The New Press). At a time when many celebrities are afraid to speak out on public issues, this well written history looks back at what Fonda actually did during the Vietnam war.
• Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster (City Lights). A gonzo novel that flashes back and forth between CIO organizing in an L.A. slaughterhouse to life after the Aztecs conquered the Europeans to the invasion of Russia during World War II, and much more.
• Loverboy/Juanito el cariñoso by Lee Merrill Byrd and Francisco Delgado (Cinco Puntos). A vivid, bilingual children’s book that uses a story to focus on the numbers 1 to 10.
• The Art of Country Grain Elevators by Jon Volkmer and Bruce Selyem (Bottom Dog). Photos of picturesque grain elevators and poems inspired by them about personal and cultural experiences in the Midwest.
• Justice on the Job edited by Block, Friedman, Kaminski, and Levin (Upjohn). Papers from a conference on the erosion of collective bargaining in the U.S.
• Labour Left Out by Roy J. Adams (CCPA). Many in the U.S. speak of Canada as a model but this Canadian professor reports that workers’ rights are declining there as well.
• Death in the Haymarket by James Green (Pantheon). A readable account of some of the first labor battles in the U.S. as seven Chicago activists were executed in 1886 during the fight for the eight-hour day. A good window into the development of industrial America after the Civil War.
• An Unreasonable Woman by Diane Wilson (Chelsea Green). A true autobiographical story that is as engaging as a good novel. Written by a fourth-generation commercial fisherwoman in Texas who gradually got drawn into leading a fight against a multinational polluter and regulators who turned a blind eye. The writing style is stunningly original, full of humor and irony, authentic dialogue, and rich images and similes.
• Patrols by Walter Dean Myers (HarperCollins). A most unusual children’s book about war. Focuses on a U.S. soldier in Vietnam and his fears and feelings about the opposing army. Compelling graphics.
• Crossing Bok Chitto by Tim Tingle (Cinco Puntos). A beautifully illustrated children’s story about Choctaws in Mississippi who helped nearby slaves escape to freedom.
• Saving Troy by William B. Patrick (Hudson Whitman). The author spent a year with firefighters in Troy, New York, and provides an insider, non-sugarcoated account of the psychological as well as physical stresses they face. A rare up-close-and-personal window into a blue-collar occupation.
• Hokum edited by Paul Beatty (Bloomsbury). While this substantial collection is billed as an “anthology of African-American humor,” many of the items have intensely serious overtones. Includes poetry, jokes, short stories, rap lyrics, and much more by dozens of the best known black writers and public figures throughout American history.
• Re-Inventing the People by Shelton Stromquist (Univ. of Illinois). An academic study that argues that the failure of much of modern liberalism to embrace class issues has its roots in the same blind spot in the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago.
• Letters from Young Activists edited by Berger, Boudin, and Farrow (Nation Books). Thoughts from an impressively diverse group of nearly 50 young activists about issues they face in their work and within the progressive movement. A few examples: Sarah Stillman argues that the self-described Third Wave of the women’s movement must become as concerned with economic and class issues at home and abroad as with personal and cultural freedom. Nell Hirschmann-Levy asks whether requiring gay and lesbian union organizers to hide their identities is the best way to build a strong and inclusive movement.
• A Right to Housing edited by Rachel Bratt, Michael Stone, Chester Hartman (Temple University). A comprehensive examination of the housing crisis in America, why past responses have failed, and what should be done.
• Inside Toyland by Christine L. Williams (Univ. of Calif.) A Texas sociologist worked for about six weeks each at two different toy stores, getting an inside view of class, race, and gender issues in the large-scale retail industry.
• Strikes, Picketing, and Inside Campaigns: A Legal Guide for Unions by Robert M. Schwartz (Work Rights Press). A practical and readable step-by-step guide to the legal aspects of setting up, conducting, and concluding a strike.
• Turning Life Into Fiction by Robin Hemley (Graywolf). A guide for the many aspiring fiction writers who aren’t sure where to get authentic material. Talks about how to keep a journal, write down one’s dreams, build on stories told by elders, and other techniques. Includes exercises.
• Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace by Dennis Reina and Michelle Reina ((Berrett-Koehler). Practical advice with lots of examples.
• Sundown Towns by James Loewen (New Press). Beginning in the 1890s thousands of communities in the Midwest and West began to drive African Americans out of their towns through violence, laws, and other tactics. Communities that today seem to have always been “naturally” all white were, in many cases, made that way through conscious policies.
• Forgotten Families by Jody Heymann (Oxford University). An account of how changing conditions of work in the global economy affect children and families around the world.
• Wal-Mart: The Face of 21^st Century Capitalism edited by Nelson Lichtenstein (New Press). An impressive collection of essays about how Wal-Mart actually works and what impact it has on many aspects of society in the U.S. and abroad. Provides far more understanding of the most important company in the world than can be found in the everyday news media.
• Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper (Nation Books). One of the more unusual books to come out in years. Stamper was police chief for Seattle from 1994 to 2000, capping a 34-year career as a police officer. In rich detail he draws on his experiences to argue for radically new approaches on such issues as drugs, prostitution, gun control, capital punishment, community oversight, and more. Although a strong supporter of unions, Stamper devotes a whole chapter to a blunt argument that police unions too often have defended an indefensible status quo.
• A People’s History of Science by Clifford D. Conner (Nation Books). The great-man theory of history takes another blow in this innovative and fascinating look at how much scientific and technological knowledge has been advanced throughout history by unsung working people – even by slaves -- and not just the lone individual geniuses portrayed in most textbooks.
• Women on the Edge edited by Samantha Dunn and Julianne Ortale (Toby Press). New short stories by women in L.A. that delve into a range of life’s experiences.
• Paul Wellstone by Bill Lofy (University of Michigan). Though Lofy was a Wellstone colleague, he is not afraid to be critical and analytical about strategic choices the activist and senator made during his career.
• Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit (Nation Books). Thoughts on how and why to sustain hope in these difficult times.
• Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work by Janet Zandy (Rutgers University). At a time when so much of “culture” is disconnected from the experiences of most people at work each day, Zandy continues in her writings to examine literature and art that are by or about working people. Best suited for those comfortable with academic language.
• Taking Back the Corporation by Ralph Estes (Nation Books). A basic introduction to the need for increased corporate accountability.
• Reclaiming the Ivory Tower by Joe Berry (Monthly Review Press). One activist’s take on issues related to organizing adjunct faculty in universities.
• When Affirmative Action was White by Ira Katznelson (W.W. Norton). A revealing book that casts new light on today’s debates about affirmative action by showing how key “universal” programs of the New Deal and Fair Deal, including Social Security, the GI Bill, and basic labor laws were set up and administered in such a way that they brought middle-class prosperity to millions of white families but not to blacks.
• Working Toward Whiteness by David Roediger (Basic). Explores the role of the labor movement and other institutions in the transformation of Eastern European, Italian, and Jewish immigrants – who were not originally treated as part of the “white” American majority -- into the “white ethnics” of today.
• Impossible Subjects by Mae M. Ngai (Princeton). Traces the development of the concept of the “illegal alien” in the U.S. and the evolution of public attitudes and public policy on immigration.
• The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy by Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich (Berrett-Koehler). A collaboration by an organizer and philosopher examines in depth the effects of the takeover of vital public services by corporate special interests. One bonus is that the book is sprinkled with song lyrics by Kahn, an accomplished songwriter and performer.
• The Great American Job Scam by Greg LeRoy (Berrett-Koehler). Documents in plain language the ways that corporations play off one state or city against another in order to get special subsidies in return for the promise of jobs. These subsidies that often equal more than $100,000 per job are virtually never conditioned on actually producing and maintaining jobs, let alone jobs with good pay, health coverage, and pensions.
• The Scorpion’s Tail by Sylvia Torti (Curbstone). A novel based on the author’s own experience as a scientific researcher who happened to find herself in Chiapas when the Zapatista revolt began. Has the ring of truth that comes from “writing what you know.”
• Watercolor Women Opaque Men by Ana Castillo (Curbstone). A novel in verse built on archetypal images of the experience of working class Mexican immigrant women.
• “Stories From Where We Live” Series (Milkweed Editions). A series of collections of stories, poems, and historical writings in which each volume focuses on a particular region of the U.S. Geared toward and intended for use in schools.
• The New Division of Labor by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane (Princeton/Russell Sage). Explores the impact of computerization on the future shape of the job market and the skills workers need.
• Restore the American Dream by Thomas Kochan (MIT). Explores policy proposals to help working people cope with today’s economy.
• Labor Embattled by David Brody (Univ. of Illinois). Focuses on the deterioration of labor laws in the U.S.
• The People’s Tycoon by Steven Watts (Knopf). A more than 500-page biography that explores the contradiction-filled life of Henry Ford, including his fierce opposition to unions even as he proclaimed that working people had to be paid enough to be good consumers.
• Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers (Rethinking Schools Press).  Some of the latest innovative experiences and ideas for using the teaching of math to promote critical thinking and civic participation. Also new: Rethinking Globalization, an indepth compilation of material to help students examine issues raised by globalization. Both these guides are interesting reading even for non-teachers.
• Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner (Milkweed). An engrossing autobiographical novel about growing up in remote Alaska and then encountering modern urban life. Unusually authentic, detailed, and expressive writing.
• Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Olive Branch). A collection that gives post-9/11 voice to diverse attitudes on the part of Muslim women from seven countries and various ethnic backgrounds.
• Lucha Libre, The Man in the Silver Mask by Xavier Garza (Cinco Puntos). A bilingual childrens book that tells a story about the wrestling matches between good and evil that are beloved community events in Mexican culture.
• My So-Called Digital Life edited by Bob Pletka (Santa Monica Press). Two thousand California teenagers were given digital cameras to document their lives and communities. Three hundred of their photographs are printed with commentary they provided. Many reveal a world in which it is a real struggle to maintain hope.
• Enough Already! by Bruce O'Hara (New Star). Aimed at professionals in their 50s, this energetic and hopeful book argues against waiting until standard retirement age to begin new, long postponed pursuits and life changes. A key for many such people, O'Hara says, is to learn to live with less income in order to free up time.
• 1491 by Charles C. Mann (Knopf). Collects recent research suggesting that before Columbus the peoples of North American were more numerous and in many ways more advanced than their European counterparts. Challenging images of primitive natives, Mann argues that the so-called conquest was made possible by the spreading of disease and not by superior culture or arms.
• Line Break by James Scully (Curbstone). Provocative essays that argue that all language is political. Critiques, for example, supposedly left poetry or other arts that celebrate the victimhood rather than empowerment of exploited people.
• Poor Workers Unions by Vanessa Tait (South End). A journalist and union activist looks at movements since the 1960s that were organized on issues affecting people of color and working women that the traditional labor movement failed to address. She reports that many of the most successful union organizing campaigns in the past two decades have used tactics similar to those poor peoples organizations, and argues that social justice unionism must be a key to any revitalization for labor.
• The Heart of Whiteness by Robert Jensen (City Lights). An essay in which a white professor grapples with his own experiences and feelings about race and challenges common rationalizations and responses such as diversity programs.
• Writing the World: On Globalization edited by David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor (MIT). Essays, memoirs, poems, and stories that reflect a variety of cross-cultural personal experiences in an increasingly globalized world.
• Silenced edited by David Dadge (Prometheus). First-person reports from all over the world by journalists who faced repression for exposing wrongdoing.
• Loving Through Bars by Cynthia Martone (Santa Monica Press). A personal account by a school principal as she discovered the problems faced by her students who were among the 2.3 million children in the U.S. who have a parent in prison.
• Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists by Betsy Leondar-Wright (New Society). This guide to how organizations and individuals can take class into account in building effective and united movements should be required reading before middle-class activists make unnecessary mistakes and miss opportunities.  Built mainly on a series of short first-person anecdotes from dozens of activists that illustrate basic issues and principles, the book is packed with practical and honest discussion and light on rhetoric.
• Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching by Poverty & Race Research Action Council and Teaching for Change (order via teachingforchange.org). This admirable 576-page resource guide for teachers and community groups provides practical tools for teaching more about the civil rights movement than that Martin Luther King was a great speaker or that Rosa Parks sat down in a bus. It provides lesson plans, tips from teachers, readings, and other materials, and connects the African-American movement to the struggles of other groups. It was prepared by experienced educators and is already in use in many schools. The book makes illuminating reading even for those who are not teachers but are interested in the history of the movement for progressive social change.
• Music of the Mill by Luis J. Rodriguez (Rayo). This book might cause heartburn for literary experts because of it is a quirky mixture of novel, nonfiction, autobiography, and the author’s musings about spirituality, the good life, and many other topics. But because it draws so heavily from his own experiences as an L.A. steelworker and cultural and community activist, it is informative and authentic – like spending a few hours talking to a thoughtful person and storyteller who has seen and done a lot in his day. (See the author’s bio at http://www.luisjrodriguez.com/history/history.html. Much of what’s in the bio is in the book in one form or another.)  Rare in its depiction of industrial work and union politics among Latino, African American, and white workers.
• On the Border by Michel Warshawski (South End). A Jewish activist in Israel who has fought for peace and justice for both Jews and Palestinians argues that Israelis must find a way to live as part of the Middle East and not in what he calls their own new ghetto.
• California Uncovered edited by Divakaruni, Justice, and Quay (Heyday). A diverse, high quality collection of short stories, excerpts from novels, poems, and interviews. It is  sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities, which intends the book to be a tool in a state-wide campaign of exhibits, events, and school projects.  The excerpts from novels in particular provide a good sampler for further reading.
• The Other Side of the Postcard edited by devorah major (City Lights). When the editor was named San Francisco’s poet laureate, she used her new position to stimulate and collect poems by school children, homeless people, workers, and other voices that need to be heard.
• Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion by Carl R. Weinberg (Southern Illinois University). Explores the complicated world of Illinois coal miners who went on strike during World War I, defying their government and their union leaders, but then were stirred to such patriotic feelings that they lynched a German-American miner accused of disloyal statements about the U.S.
• Southland by Nina Revoyr (Akashic).  An engrossing and well researched mystery novel that not only entertains but sheds revealing light on L.A. history, with a special focus on the experience of Japanese-Americans.
• An Action a Day by Mike Hudema (Between the Lines).  A handy, practical guide to 52 types of direct action to get public attention and challenge big corporations and the politicians allied with them. Briefly describes each action idea, how it’s been used, and what materials or resources are needed to pull it off.
• The Complete History of New Mexico by Kevin McIlvoy (Graywolf).  Short stories with working class characters, including a gem called “The people who own pianos” told from the point of view of a workman who moves pianos. “What makes us us and them not us?” he wonders as he describes class differences in bitter detail.
• War Movies by Wayne Karlin (Curbstone).  Karlin, who served in combat in Vietnam, recently revisited the country to help a Vietnamese team make a movie about the war.  His artful account of his trip jumps back and forth between the present and the past and between the movie and his memories as he explores our new world in which many people, including some of our elected officials, have a hard time distinguishing between movies and reality.
• Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by Richard Bermack (Heyday).  Photos and text about the men and women who went to Spain to fight fascism before World War II.  More than half the book is about their continued work for progressive causes in the decades after the war.
• News Incorporated edited by Elliot D. Cohen (Prometheus).  The range of left criticisms of the corporate media is presented in one collection of essays by many of the leading analysts.
• Nursing Against the Odds by Suzanne Gordon (Cornell).  Why do so many Americans with nursing degrees choose not to work in hospitals a failure of retention and recruitment that is often mislabeled as a nurse shortage?  In her third book about the problems facing nurses, Gordon focuses on the impact of the dysfunctional health care system on the conditions nurses need in order to provide quality care. She also explores the working relationship between nurses and doctors, as well as the impact of distorted media coverage.
• Health Security for All by Alan Derickson (Johns Hopkins University).  A brief history of attempts during the 20th century to win universal health care in America.
• Whales & Dolphins of the World by Mark Simmonds (MIT Press).  A gorgeous coffee table book with lots of photos, plus text that gives basic information on these animals’ biology, habits, and need for protection from man-made hazards.
• Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers Rights at Wal-Mart by Liza Featherstone (Basic Books).  If you have a general concern that the practices of the nations largest employer are hurting workers and communities, this book featuring Wal-Mart workers own stories will make you realize the situation is even worse than you thought.
• Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor by Steve Lerner (MIT Press).  A classic example of the intersection of the civil rights and environmental movements as a black community that was excluded from jobs at two Shell plants but not from the pollution Shell produced gained national and international allies to win relocation to other homes.
• Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas by Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval (Routledge).  Uses four case studies of international anti-sweatshop campaigns to openly discuss strategic debates and tensions among various student, union, and solidarity groups.
• Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America by Douglas Flamming (Univ. of Calif.).  Many African Americans from the South headed for Los Angeles in the half century before World War II, hoping, like other migrants before them, to find freedom and opportunity.  This is the story of what they found.
• Espejos y Ventanas/Mirros and Windows: Oral Histories of Mexican Farmworkers and Their Families edited by Mark Lyons and August Tarrier (New City Community Press).  Interviews with immigrant families in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania mushroom capital of the world.
• Troublemakers Handbook 2 edited by Jane Slaughter (Labor Notes Books).  A new edition that provides more than 350 pages of real-life stories and practical advice on virtually every aspect of union activity.
• Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might by Mark Reutter (Univ. of Illinois).  A new chapter updates a 1988 book on how management decisions ran the U.S. steel industry into the ground.
• What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank (Metropolitan).  A journalist returns to his home state to describe for coastal urbanites how the right has used cultural resentments to get working class whites to vote against their economic interests.
• The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans by Chris Beard (Univ. of Calif.)  An account for lay people of two centuries of discoveries shedding light on humans’ evolutionary history.
• Dillinger in Hollywood by John Sayles (Nation Books).  A brilliant collection of ten short stories that feature a wide range of working class people and draw on the film maker’s imagination and talent for painting engaging characters.
• Whitewashed Adobe by William Deverell (Univ of Calif.)  A fascinating and surprising collection of essays about six little known events or developments that together provide a rich understanding of the gradual Anglo takeover of Los Angeles from its Mexican population.  The chapters cover a wide range from culture to labor to public health.
• The Next Los Angeles by Gottlieb, Vallianatos, Freer, and Dreier (Univ. of Calif.)  A concise and useful introduction to the 20^th century political history of L.A. from a left perspective, plus a proposal for a program progressives should unite behind now.  There should be a guide like this to the history of every city.
• Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in 20^th Century America by Zaragosa Vargas (Princeton University).  At a time when unions are still divided over whether to embrace and empower immigrant workers, Vargas describes immigrant struggles for labor rights in the years before and after World War II that helped set the stage for the civil rights movement.
• Sickness and Wealth: The Corporate Assault on Global Health by Fort, Mercer, and Gish (South End).  A comprehensive look at how policies of global corporations, governments, and institutions like the World Bank and World Trade Organization are undermining health in poor countries.
• Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice by Silliman, Fried, Ross, and Gutierrez (South End).  Uses case studies to show the race, ethnicity, and class issues that go beyond the media’s portrayal of a “choice” movement led by white women.
• Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff (Chelsea Green).  Lakoff has received a great deal of publicity for arguing that Democrats ought to pay attention to framing issues and choosing vocabulary in a way that connects with an electoral majority. This call for more deliberate strategy is sometimes more useful than his particular prescriptions for implementation.
• The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions by Dr. David Ray Griffin (Interlink).  The author of “The New Pearl Harbor” went through the 9/11 Commission report and concludes that it was more designed to bring “closure” to the event than to investigate the administration’s actions leading up to it.
• Hijacking Catastrophe by Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp (Olive Branch).  Interviews with many of the left’s leading commentators on how Bush and the right used fear after 9/11 to implement their longstanding political agenda.
• Gender and Work in Today’s World edited by Nancy E. Sacks and Catherine Marrone (Westview).  A useful smorgasbord of 29 writings about a wide range of issues related to work and gender, family responsibilities, and economic opportunity.
• America (The Book) by Jon Stewart and the Writers of the Daily Show (Warner Books).  A half-serious, half-comedy take on American history and American society today in the form of a thick parody of a high school textbook, complete with rather unorthodox discussion questions and classroom activities listed after each chapter.
• Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber (Brookings).  Two Yale professors have conducted experiments in a dozen states since 1998 comparing the actual effect of various commonly used methods aimed to turning out voters.  Their key conclusion: door-to-door canvassing with person-to-person conversation is both far more effective and cheaper than methods commonly promoted by campaign consultants such as direct mail and automated phone calls.
• Waiting for Rain by Nicholas Arons (University of Arizona).  An on-the-scene, New Yorker-quality report on Northeast Brazil and how it is affected by recurrent drought, with a twin emphasis on how natural conditions are manipulated by the politically powerful and on the truths told about the situation over the years by writers and poets.
• Damned If I Do by Percival Everett (Graywolf).  An unusually original and entertaining set of short stories that combine elements of satire and the tall tale, often involving African American characters in the small-town West.
• Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio (Curbstone).  A moving, poetic novel that tells the stories of two girls, one Jewish and one Palestinian, from the time of the holocaust to the founding of Israel.
• Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers by Herman Benson (Association for Union Democracy).  A memoir by the founder of AUD, the independent center that for decades has fought to protect the rights of union members.
• Civil Liberties vs. National Security in a Post-9/11 World edited by Darmer, Baird, and Rosenbaum (Prometheus).  A collection that provides a thorough, readable discussion of the issues involving the Patriot Act, domestic surveillance, racial profiling, and torture.  Includes some key documents as background.
• Allan Houser: An American Master by W. Jackson Rushing III (Harry N. Abrams).  Houser, one of the leading American sculptors of the 20^th century, is one of two contemporary artists whose work is featured in the opening exhibits of the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.  Houser’s parents were Apaches who were imprisoned by the U.S. government for more than 25 years beginning in the late 1800s.  The new book combines beautiful photos of Houser’s work with fascinating text about his development as an artist.  See also www.allanhouser.com
• Monitoring Sweatshops by Jill Esbenshade (Temple University).  A former union organizer and anti-sweatshop activist evaluates the various kinds of monitoring groups that have sprung up in recent years.
• Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops by Robert J.S. Ross (University of Michigan).  An in-depth review of the problem at home and abroad, including an original analysis of media coverage that puts the blame in the wrong place.
• Labor’s Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism by Jonathan Cutler (Temple).  Cutler argues that Walter Reuther squelched a rank-and-file movement for a 30-hour workweek and in the process fueled the eventual demise of U.S. unions.
• Workplace Justice Without Unions by Hoyt Wheeler, Brian Klaas, and Douglas Mahony (Upjohn).  As unions have declined, some nonunion companies have set up dispute resolution procedures that claim to ensure workplace fairness.  The authors try to quantify whether nonunion systems provide the same protection as union contracts.
• Horse Thief by Anna Balint (Curbstone).  Generally well written stories about poor and working class people facing hard times in London and the American west coast.
• Las Hermanas by Lara Medina (Temple) tells the history of a Chicana/Latina feminist organization within the Catholic Church.
• A Primer on American Labor Law by William B. Gould IV (MIT Press).  Updated version of textbook.
• The Next American Essay edited by John D'Agata (Graywolf).  A challenging and stimulating collection of creative nonfiction, selected from the past 30 years, by masters such as Sherman Alexie, Annie Dillard, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and many more.  Includes a great variety of surprising subjects and risk-taking styles.
• Which Side Are You On? by Thomas Geoghegan (The New Press) has a new 66-page afterword that updates this book on today's labor movement that was originally issued in 1991.  In his quirky, provocative style that mixes personal experiences as a labor lawyer with broader commentary, Geoghegan riffs on the roots of unions' decline and what it will take to revive them.
• Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement by Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss (Univ. of California).  Another of the many books published in the past eight years summarizing some of the labor movement's problems and needed changes.
• Mark Twain's San Francisco (Heyday).  An entertaining collection of newspaper columns and sketches written by Twain in the 1860s that gives a picture of western life at that time.
• The Trail We Leave by Ruben Palma (Curbstone).  Poignant short fiction by a Chilean who was forced into exile in Denmark after the Pinochet coup in 1973.  Cultural uprooting provides the context, but many of the feelings the characters experience are universal.
• Present/Tense: Poets in the World edited by Mark Pawlak (Hanging Loose).  Work with social or political themes by leading poets.  Some are more rhetorical than poetic, but many are artful.
• Blue Collar Jesus: How Christianity Supports Workers' Rights by Darren Cushman Wood (Seven Locks).  A Methodist minister from Indianapolis reviews biblical references that encourage support for workers' struggles and describes how throughout American history some religious leaders have stood with working people trying to form unions.
• Press Box Red by Irwin Silber (Temple Univ.).  It's hard to imagine today that a sports columnist for the Communist Party's Daily Worker played a key role in pressuring baseball to break the color bar, but Lester Rodney did, and this book tells the story, with first-hand accounts of his interactions with Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and many of the other key figures in that historic drama.
• Negro League Baseball by Neil Lanctot (Univ. of Pennsylvania).  A well researched, textbook account of the management and financial side of the Negro leagues, supplementing other books that focus on the players.  Shows management's ambivalence when major league baseball began to integrate.
• Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery by Jennifer L. Morgan (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press).  An academic study that draws on historical records to examine exploitation of and resistance by African women both as field hands and producers of new slaves for plantation owners.
• Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community by Gilda L. Ochoa (Univ. of Texas).  With a focus on the working class city of La Puente, California, this Pomona College professor looks at conflicting ways that native-born Mexican Americans relate to new Spanish-speaking immigrants.
• The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown, U.S.A. by Lisa M. Fine (Temple Univ.).  A history of mostly white, rural men who worked for a paternalistic auto company in Lansing, Michigan.
• Sarge by Scott Stossel (Smithsonian).  Authorized biography of Sargent Shriver, who played a key role in the 1960s in starting programs such as the Peace Corps and Head Start.  Contains lots of unflattering anecdotes about the Kennedy clan into which he married.
• From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture by Paul Buhle (Verso).  From the title, one might fear a book that does little more than point out that lots of famous people were Jewish.  Instead, it is a real work of history that asks how Jews came to be involved in popular culture and how their experiences and traditions affected their work.
• House of Bush, House of Saud by Craig Unger (Scribner).  Presents in one place how the Bush family and their closest aides have profited personally and politically from close ties to the Saudi ruling elite -- and questions whether those links affected how Bush dealt with the Saudi connection before and after 9/11.
• Life Amongst the Modocs by Joaquin Miller (Heyday).  An absorbing autobiographical novel written in the 1870s by an Anglo who lived among native peoples in northern California during the gold rush.  Engaging characters, often suspenseful story, Thoreau-like commentary on nature and human nature, and an eyewitness account of the impact white settlers had on the people and ecology they encountered. Created quite a stir when published, and still holds up as a richly textured alternative to the official history handed down in school.
• Greed and Good by Sam Pizzigati (Apex).  A thorough review of how unprecedented inequality is eating away at every aspect of American life, plus a proposal for what could be done about it.  An imposing 550 pages of text that works because of its conversational, plain talking style and preference for substance over sloganeering.  Would make an excellent core textbook for a course on America today from the high school level on up.
• Labor's Story in the United States by Philip Yale Nicholson (Temple Univ.)  In
• 335 pages it tries to cover labor history from the founding of the colonies to the present.  Inevitably leaves room to quibble about details, omissions, etc., but still a useful effort.
• The Importance of a Piece of Paper by Jimmy Santiago Baca (Grove).  Quality short stories about a variety of characters in today's New Mexico.
• By a Thread: How Child Care Centers Hold Onto Teachers, How to Build Lasting Careers by Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai (Upjohn).  A study that concludes that child care workers need a strong organization to increase pay and other conditions in order to improve quality by reducing turnover.
• The Problem of the Media by Robert W. McChesney (Monthly Review Press).  Most comprehensive analysis yet from one of leading critics of corporate media.
• Vietnam Veteranos by Lea Ybarra (University of Texas).  Interviews with Chicano vets about their combat experiences and the impact of the war back home.
• Whose Detroit? By Heather Ann Thompson (Cornell).  Recounts tension in the late 1960s and early 1970s among black radicals, auto companies, and union leaders.
• Selavi: That is Life by Youme Landowne (Cinco Puntos).  A children's book about street children in Haiti who are helped by some caring adults.
• Ramblin' Man by Ed Cray (W.W.Norton). The complete story of what appears to have been the generally unhappy life of Woody Guthrie.
• The Fire This Time: Young Feminists and the New Activism edited by Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin (Anchor).  A collection about activism on media and culture, globalization, and other issues.
• Seaport with text by Phillip Lopate (Smithsonian).  More than a hundred photos of New York's harbor and waterfront in the early 1900s.
• Without an Alphabet, Without a Face by Saadi Youssef (Graywolf).  Poems by an Iraqi who has lived all over the Arab world and in Europe.  In his poem, "America, America," he writes:  "I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island…But I am not American.  Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age?"
• Reorganizing the Rust Belt by Steven Henry Lopez (University of California).  Some of the common themes in the “new” labor movement are the need to organize through person-to-person contact, to shift from business unionism to social movement unionism, and to link union and community issues.  This book delves into the challenges, difficulties, and opportunities those shifts involve in real campaigns, focusing on nursing home organizing and anti-privatization fights in Pennsylvania.
• The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin (Interlink).  Warning: this book may give you the creeps. This Claremont professor has summarized in 168 pages the evidence that calls into question the official conspiracy theory provided by the Bush administration for what happened on September 11, 2001.   Harking back to incidents like the blowing up of the Maine or the Gulf of Tonkin that apparently were manufactured or allowed to happen in order to pave the way to war, Griffin soberly reviews facts and contradictions that suggest that Sept. 11 may have been more than just a convenient opportunity for the Bush team to carry out an extreme international and domestic agenda.  Griffin doesn’t claim to have answers, but he argues that an independent investigation is needed.
• Bushwomen by Laura Flanders (Verso).  This anecdote-packed profile of high-ranking women around Bush tells how Labor Secretary Elaine Chao took on longshore workers to the benefit of family and friends involved in the shipping business; how cultural values defender Lynne Cheney published a steamy lesbian novel; how affirmative action opponents had doors opened for themselves by the women's movement; and much more.
• The Hidden Cost of Being African American by Thomas M. Shapiro (Oxford University).  Combines statistics, analysis, and interviews to show the importance of wealth -- not just income -- in maintaining inequality, generation after generation.
• Labor and the Environmental Movement by Brian K. Obach (MIT).  Using academic theories of his field, a sociologist explores the history and current experience of labor-environmentalist collaboration and conflict.
• The Children of NAFTA by David Bacon (Univ. of Calif. Press).  This journalist/activist witnessed many key events during the past decade that illustrate in human terms the corporate agenda in the U.S.-Mexico border region and attempts to link progressive movements in both countries.
• The FBI Files by Arnold Mesches (Hanging Loose Press).  Mesches is an artist who for 26 years was spied on by the FBI, with help from his neighbors and friends as he supported petitions for peace and made posters for rallies.  Reviewing his FBI file inspired 56 works of art that he displays side by side with pages from the file.  The total effect brilliantly evokes the cultural climate of the 1950s, while being quite timely in the Ashcroft era.  The only drawback to the book is that the format is too small to do justice to the art, which can be seen full size in a traveling exhibit.
• Under the Fifth Sun edited by Rick Heide (Heyday).  An excellent 535-page collection of Latino literature from the founding of California to the present.  Includes a substantial section on literature related to work.
• No Rooms of Their Own edited by Ida Rae Egli (Heyday).  An anthology of women writers in California from 1849-1869.  Quality fiction and first-person accounts that give a different view of the settling of the West.
• The Other Women's Movement by Dorothy Sue Cobble (Princeton).  A book that fills a real need.  Documents the women's movement among union women since the 1940s and its class tensions with the better publicized feminist movement led by more well-to-do women.  Calls for a more class-conscious feminism in which "the decline of organized labor would be seen as a feminist issue" and that would deal with raising pay and benefits for those at the bottom, the desire of many service workers to improve the service they provide and the control they have over their work, and the need for the  flexibility at work that a healthy family life requires.
• Break Any Woman Down by Dana Johnson (Anchor).  Generally first-rate short stories with working class African-American characters in L.A.  Terrific ear for language -- all told in first person, each by a different character with a distinctive voice.
• Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston (Portfolio).  If you think you know what is wrong with our tax system and how it got this way, Johnston will show you that you don't know the half of it.  Readable and engaging journalism that is perfectly timed for the election season.
• At Work: The Art of California Labor edited by Mark Dean Johnson (California Historical Society/Heyday Press).  A book on this subject could easily be a dull, dated anthology of agit-prop materials, but this one is an admirable surprise -- a work of art itself, combining a diverse collection of beautifully reproduced artworks with informative historical text and well-chosen creative writing.
• Hope Dies Last by Studs Terkel (The New Press).  How do people maintain hope and keep working for change in an era of runaway corporate commercialism?  Terkel asked organizers, workers, students, priests, and many more.  A more hopeful collection than the unfortunate title suggests.
• Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe (Tarcher/Putnam).  In chatty, travel-diary style, profiles people engaged in more sustainable practices for food production and consumption in both wealthy and poor countries around the world.  Accompanied by recipes.
• Joe's Word by Elizabeth Stromme (City Lights).  A novel set in the not well-off Echo Park area of L.A.  Stromme sets up an intriguing cast of characters, though at times she is not sure what to have them do besides sex.
• World War 3 Illustrated. A magazine of comics and other material on the state of the world.  Content is more serious than first meets the eye.  Examples in latest issue on "Taking Liberties": actual maps showing an 500% increase in government surveillance cameras in Manhattan in the past four years, and a compilation of FBI action against free speech since 9-11.  Distributed by topshelfcomix.com.
• Mary Miss (Princeton Architectural Press).   Text, photos, and drawings that profile the work of an artist who makes sculpture/installations in public settings.  Makes (mostly) outdoor art that is integrated with daily life, physically involves the viewer, and uses cultural or physical elements already at the site,
• Framed!: Labor and the Corporate Media by Christopher R. Martin (Cornell).  Analyzes patterns in media coverage of labor issues, using five case studies: the shutdown of a GM plant; strikes at UPS, American Airlines, and Major League Baseball; and the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.
• · These United States edited by John Leonard (Nation Books).  A collection of essays about each state (or, in a few cases, sub-regions of large states) by mostly well-known, left-leaning commentators.  Some educate about history, culture, politics -- others are more personal musings.  Highlights include views of Washington state by Sherman Alexie, upstate New York by JoAnn Wypijewski, and Florida by T.D. Allman.
• The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler (Knopf).  An important, richly detailed work that picks up where Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed left off -- combining stories of individuals with systemic analysis.  Emphasizes that real solutions require addressing jobs, housing, education, health care, and other issues at the same time.  Mentions the impact of the decline of unions but fails to discuss either the reasons for that decline or what it will take to restore workers' freedom to organize.
• The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945 by Paul Fussell (Modern Library). Is war heroic? Not to this author, who was there and who documents its insanity.
• To Move a Mountain: Fighting the Global Economy in Appalachia by Eve Weinbaum (New Press).  Chronicles campaigns against plant closings in three Appalachian communities.  Argues that such campaigns can have important effects even though they don't save the jobs.
• Assumption and Other Stories by Daniel A. Olivas (Bilingual Press).  Short stories featuring Latino characters in Los Angeles.
• Harlem on the Verge by Alice Attie (Quantuck Lane).  Photos that seek to capture Harlem's uniqueness as chain stores start to make it look like every other place.
• We, Too, Are Americans by Megan Taylor Shockley (Univ. of Illinois).  With a focus on two places -- Detroit and Richmond -- it shows how the experience of African American women during World War II in factories and civic organizations such as the Red Cross played a part, along with the changed outlook of returning soliders, in helping to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
• Crossing the River by Nguyen Huy Thiep (Curbstone).  Short stories that give a feel for life in Vietnam today.
• The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles edited by Scott Timberg and Dana Gioia (Red Hen Press).  Essays on literature and culture, with a particular focus on some of L.A.'s best known writers.
• To America With Love: Letters from the Underground by Anita and Abbie Hoffman, Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s by Tom Hayden, and Who the Hell is Stew Albert? by Stew Albert (all from Red Hen).  The Hoffmans' letters were written when Abbie was underground.  Makes companion reading to the film about their lives, Steal This Movie.
• Growing a Reader from Birth by Diane McGuinness (WW Norton).  Tells parents how to help children in their first five years to prepare for literacy.
• The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire by Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman (Public Affairs).  An entertaining look at one of the most powerful American families you probably never heard of.  The Boswells own the biggest farming operation in the U.S. and have dominated the human and physical landscape of central California for generations.  The book serves as a comprehensive and readable social history of the land of Steinbeck and Cesar Chavez.
• Black Liberation and the American Dream edited by Paul Le Blanc (Humanity).  A lengthy essay on African American history introduces readings from many of the most famous black leaders and activists.  Argues for closely linking issues of racial and economic justice.
• Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano (Wiley).  A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who is the son of a bricklayer interviewed more than a hundred white-collar children of blue-collar parents about conflicts and discrimination they faced in college, the work world, and social interactions.
• The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform by Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt (Univ. of Illinois).  Looks at a period after the Civil War in which Native Americans were encouraged to give up communal land for individually-held property and when a political debate raged over whether they should be considered citizens with rights that could be enforced in courts.
• Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam edited by Wayne Karlin and Ho Anh Thai (Curbstone).  Fiction by 45 Vietnamese authors.
• West of the Jordan by Laila Halaby (Beacon).  A novel told from the point of view of four women who are cousins in a Jordanian family whose members are now split between the Middle East and the U.S.
• Know It By Heart by Karl Luntta (Curbstone).  A novel for young teens about conflicts that arise when a racially mixed family moved into a white neighborhood in Connecticut in 1961.
• Once Upon a Cuento edited by Lyn Miller-Lachmann (Curbstone).  Short stories for young people by 14 Latino authors.
• The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Underground Economy by James S. Henry (Four Walls Eight Windows).  An investigative report on the damage done by multinational banks around the world.
• The Making of a Cybertariat by Ursula Huws (Monthly Review).  A feminist political economist looks at the human impact of new technology.
• Waterfront Revolts: New York and London Dockworkers, 1946-61, by Colin J. Davis (University of Illinois Press).  Compares experiences in a period in which there were major strikes and rank-and-file movements against companies, governments, and at times old-line union leaders.
• Foul Ball by Jim Bouton (Bulldog Publishing).  A funny, engaging, very readable book that on its surface is about the fight to save an historic baseball park in Pittsfield, MA, but that develops into a rare, detailed inside look at the mechanics of how big outside corporations dictate local government policy and trample on the public interest.  The author is a former Yankees pitcher whose book Ball Four in 1970 provided one of the first honest looks inside major league baseball.
• Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston by Howard Bryant (Beacon).  A newspaper reporter's exploration of racial issues, rooted in the history of the Boston Red Sox and the city where the team plays.  Its strength is inside anecdotes and interviews with former Red Sox players and executives.  Tells how a Jewish liberal councilman forced the Red Sox to give Jackie Robinson a tryout in 1945.  The Red Sox didn't put their first black player on their roster until 12 years after Robinson broke the color bar with the Dodgers in 1947.  This history, Bryant says, has something to do with why the Sox didn't reach the World Series for so many decades.
• Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle (Atlantic Monthly Press).  Far more than an account of  a deadly 1911 fire in a New York clothing factory, this well-researched account serves as a jumping-off point for exploring the roots of modern liberalism and the New Deal and the rise of women and immigrants as political forces in America.
• The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements by Dan Clawson (Cornell University Press).  Examining some of labor's more successful campaigns in recent years, Clawson argues that the labor movement cannot be revived through incremental change, but only by joining with other social movements to inspire millions of working people to action.
• Understanding the Bible: An Introduction for Skeptics, Seekers, and Religious Liberals by John A. Buehrens (Beacon).  Concerned that progressives have ceded the Bible to the right, the former president of the Unitarians provides a useful interpretation from a liberal point of view.
• Boob Jubilee: The Cultural Politics of the New Economy edited by Thomas Frank and David Mulcahey (Norton).  A collection of articles from the magazine, The Baffler, that in many cases provide original takes on the cultural, economic, and political outrages of the day.
• Life in Prairie Land by Eliza W. Farnham (University of Illinois Press).  A real treat fo those who like to study history through first-hand accounts, this combination of autobiography and travel writing was produced in 1846 by an early feminist who moved from New York to the prairies.
• Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy by Michael D. Yates (Monthly Review Press).  A basic introduction to how the capitalist economic system works today.
• Frontier Justice:  Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America by Scott Ritter (Context Books).  When the invasion of Iraq began and former U.N. weapons inspector Ritter began to appear on TV talk shows, many wondered who he was and how credible his critique of U.S. policy might be.  In this book he tries to answer those questions.
• For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State by Jennifer Klein (Princeton University Press). If you've ever wondered how the U.S. ended up with a system of corporate controlled and firm-based health and retirement benefits, this book provides the history.
• How Class Works by Stanley Aronowitz (Yale University Press).  Argues for thinking about "class struggle" in terms of social movements as well as economic classes.
• Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race by Stephanie Nolen (Four Walls Eight Windows).  The story of 13 experienced pilots who were denied the chance to be among the first astronauts because they were female.
• The Pueblo Imagination: Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon, with writings by Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, and Simon Ortiz (Beacon).  A beautiful portrait of the Pueblo people of New Mexico through 78 photos taken mainly between the 1940s and 1960s.  Both through style and substance, the poetry and prose text helps evoke the culture.
• Milton Rogovin: The Forgotten Ones by Isay, Miller, and Wang (Quantuck Lane Press).  An unusually touching photo-and-text book featuring portraits of poor people in Buffalo.  The highlight is a series of photos taken of the same people once a decade for 30 years, together with interviews with them about what they see when they look at the pictures.
• Christ in Concrete is a 1949 film recently re-released on DVD.  Directed by Edward Dmytryk, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, the film is based on the classic novel by the same name.  It tells the story of Italian immigrant construction workers trying to pursue the American Dream in New York and finding that America is not the land of milk and honey they envisioned.  For information, see www.alldayentertainment.com.
• Reforming the Chicago Teamsters: The Story of Local 705 by Robert Bruno (Northern Illinois University Press).  Chicago Local 705 was a key battleground in the 1990s wars between old guard Teamster officials and rank-and-file reformers.  Bruno looks at how democracy led to a stronger union for the members, and gives a blow-by-blow description of the tug of war for control.
• Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union by David Witwer (University of Illinois Press). Looks at Teamsters history from the union's founding early in the 20th century to the 1960s.  Examines such questions as why that union was particularly susceptible to corruption, how members reacted during different eras, and how workers' enemies exploited the corruption issue.
• Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing by Dana Beth Weinberg (Cornell University Press).  By focusing on change in one hospital, Weinberg gives a specific, inside view of the impact of putting finances before patient care in America's health care "system."
• Thieves in High Places by Jim Hightower (Viking).  A rant with a light touch on what's going wrong in the Bush era, with references to movements and organizations that are working for change.
• Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser (Houghton Mifflin). The most useful section is on the exploitation of undocumented immigrant workers.
• Glory in a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara by Jeffrey Tayler (Houghton Mifflin).  One traveler's view of a part of the world that is unfamiliar to most Americans.
• American Datelines: Major News Stories from Colonial Times to the Present edited by Ed Cray, Jonathan Kotler, and Miles Beller (University of Illinois Press).  A window into major events and turning points as they were covered at the time.  Reviewers will have a field day listing the ones that weren't included, starting with the CIO sitdown strikes in the 1930s. With some exceptions, it leans toward cultural history rather than issues of economics and class.
• Revolucion: Cuban Poster Art by Lincoln Cushing (Chronicle Books).  Two things are striking about this collection: the sophisticated graphics and use of color in many of these works of propaganda, and the glorification of weapons and military imagery.
• The Player: Christy Mathewson, Baseball, and the American Century by Philip Seib (Four Walls Eight Windows).  Seib portrays Mathewson as the antithesis of the selfish, trouble-plagued athlete so often focused on in the media today.
• Forest Blood by Jeff Golden (www.forestblood.com). Don't miss this excellent novel (best ordered from the web site shown).  Set in the Pacific Northwest, it brings to life the timber wars between big corporate interests and environmentalists, with forestry workers often caught in the middle.  It has all the elements of good fiction -- suspense, three-dimensional characters you come to care about, and a real sense of place and context.
• Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Scribner).  Powerful journalism as readable as a novel, this account follows ten years in the lives of poor teenagers growing up in the Bronx surrounded by both big-time and small-time drug dealing.
• A Disturbance of Fate by Mitchell Freedman (Seven Locks).  An ambitious novel that tries to imagine what the U.S. would have been like if Robert Kennedy had not been killed in 1968 and had won the presidency.  The Democrats would have helped unions organize the South, Freedman says, and many other liberal fantasies would have come true.
• Good Faith by Jane Smiley (Knopf).  A novel that focuses on a real estate broker to recall the greed that exploded in Reagan's 1980s.
• Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism by Ruth Needleman (Cornell).  Focuses on five black steelworkers from the South who migrated to the area around Gary, Indiana.  Draws heavily on interviews so they can tell their own stories.
• After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman by Susan Eleanor Hirsch (University of Illinois) provides a case study of how race and gender have played a role in keeping workers from building a strong labor movement.
• The Great Terror War by Richard Falk, and Calling The Shot: How Washington Dominates Today’s UN by Phyllis Bennis (both published by Olive Branch Press).  Two more, highly timely books from an imprint of Interlink Publishing, which has been a leader in getting out quick analysis of U.S. government responses and alternatives post-9/11.
• War Against the Weak by Edwin Black (Four Walls Eight Windows).  This book shows that genetic engineering is not a new issue by exploring eugenics -- the effort to create a master race that was funded in the early twentieth century by the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Institution.  More than 60,000 Americans were sterilized against their will in a movement that inspired Hitler's holocaust.
• Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (Scribner).  This unforgettable, unvarnished first-person account of a Marine's experience in the 1991 Gulf War provides a more vivid, honest picture of what war in that region is like than any of the media coverage of the recent invasion of Iraq.
• What Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News by Eric Alterman (Basic Books).  A serious, in-depth, highly readable look at the media' economic and social biases.
• Education for Changing Unions by Burke, Geronimo, Martin, Thomas, and Wall (Between the Lines/SCB Distributors).  A useful, practical resource for labor educators and anyone interested in improving the quality of workshops, meetings, and conferences.
• SPIN Works!: A Media Guidebook for Communicating Values and Shaping Opinion by Robert Bray.  A basic guide to effective media work from the SPIN Project that provides training and advice to progressive organizations.
• Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich (Context).  Documents the media's role in marketing the invasion of Iraq to the American public.
• Unlocking the Middle East by Richard Falk (Interlink).  A collection of essays that provide historical background on the spectrum of difficult issues and conflicts in the region.
• Changing the Powers That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win by G. William Domhoff ( Rowman and Littlefield).  Takes on strategic questions about the Democratic Party, populism, nonviolent resistance, the news media, and other issues.
• The Environmental Justice Reader edited by Adamson, Evans, and Stein (University of Arizona Press). Essays, interviews, and personal stories that provide a wide-ranging introduction to the link between pollution, race, and class, as well as community efforts to organize on those issues.
• The Rule of Racialization by Steve Martinot (Temple University Press).  A historical look at race and class in America from the founding of the colonies to today.
• Unions and Legitimacy by Gary Chaison and Barbara Bigelow (Cornell University Press).  Uses five case studies -- the 1997 UPS strike, clerical worker organizing at Harvard, the AFL-CIO associate membership program, the campaign against NAFTA, and a nurse campaign for safe care to discuss what does and does not increase unions' legitimacy in the eyes of workers and the general public.
• How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor by Roger Waldinger and Michael Lichter (University of California Press).  Focuses on the social dynamics of the changing workforce in Los Angeles, what motivates employers to hire Latinos for low-wage jobs, and the impact on African Americans.
• No-Collar: The Human Workplace and Its Hidden Costs by Andrew Ross (Basic). A study of two "new economy" companies that argues that high-tech corporate offices have not turned out to the utopia that some promised.
• Little Stones at My Window by Mario Benedetti (Curbstone).  A bilingual collection of often imaginative and moving poems by the Uruguayan author.  Other new bilingual poetry collections from Curbstone include Casting Off by the Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria and
• The Time Tree by the Vietnamese poet Huu Thinh.
• Nobody's Son by Alberto Urrea (University of Arizona Press).  A memoir by a writer of fiction and nonfiction who grew up in San Diego, the product of a Mexican father and Anglo mother.
• A Loyal Character Dancer and Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong (Soho).  Chinese murder mysteries with a dark view of bureaucracy and corruption in the country the author left in 1989.
• Iraq Under Seige: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War edited by Anthony Arnove (South End Press) is a collection of essays that provide useful background to the pending U.S. invasion of Iraq.
• Civilian Casualties is a 60-minute video that shows four Americans who each lost a family member on 9-11 visiting Afghan villages to meet families who lost relatives in the U.S. bombing that followed.  The documentation of civilian casualties is interrupted from time to time with footage from news conferences by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who brushes off concerns about the human effects of the U.S. bombing or speeches, and from speeches by President Bush in which he says that unlike the U.S., our enemies don't care about human life.
• Veiled Threat: The Hidden Power of the Women of Afghanistan by Sally Armstrong (Four Walls Eight Windows).  Based on reporting both before and after 9-11, a journalist and UNICEF representative looks at the condition of women under the Taliban and after its overthrow.
• Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the Race War by Ismael Reed (Basic Books).  Short, biting essays on race in America today.
• Black-Brown Relations and Stereotypes by Mindiola, Niemann, and Rodriguez (University of Texas Press).  A timely study of how African Americans and Hispanics in Houston perceive each other.
• Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner (University of California Press).  A thorough expose, using internal industry documents, of the deliberate cover-up by the lead and vinyl industries of the deadly effects of products they produced.
• Hey Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray by Alison Owings ((University of California Press) is a readable mixture of journalism and oral history that shows how class shapes the experiences of working women.
• The Unmaking of the American Working Class by Reg Theriault (The New Press) draws on his 34 years of experience as a longshoreman to provide real-life insights on class and race among industrial workers.
• Not for Bread Alone by Moe Foner (Cornell University Press).  A memoir by the late hospital union leader who worked to make cultural programs a part of union life.
• Sustainable Planet edited by Juliet Schor and Betsy Taylor (Beacon).  Sponsored by the Center for a New American Dream, this collection of 16 essays argues for personal, family, social, and economic policies that reduce consumption and change the way goods are produced.
• Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes by Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins (Beacon).  A defense of the estate tax.
• In Schools We Trust by Deborah Meier (Beacon).  The founder of successful public schools for low-income children argues that, instead of standardized testing, education reform must create smaller schools where students are exposed to adult role models, not just skills training.
• The Real Story Series from Odonian Press.  Small format, 80- to 90-page paperbacks by Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, and other authors on subjects ranging from U.S. foreign policy to the Kennedy and King assassinations to “The CIA’s Greatest Hits.”
• Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order by David Ranney (Temple University Press).  Argues that organizing based on single-issue self interest is inadequate in a world where global forces shape local problems.
• The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir by Sudha Koul (Beacon) is a memoir of four generations of women from the land that lies between India and Pakistan.
• Flying Colors by Tim Lefens (Beacon).  An inspiring, first-person account by an artist who has taught students with severe disabilities to paint using innovative technology, even though many can't use their hands or speak.
• Dead Cities by Mike Davis (The New Press).  A dark riff on the deadly effects of social and environmental apocalypse.
• The Crazed by Han Jin (Pantheon) uses the format of a novel to launch a diatribe against China's rulers.  It lacks the artistry that made "Waiting," his first novel about life in today's China, so special.
• By These Hands: Portraits from the Factory Floor (Minnesota Historical Society Press) is a collection of photographs by David Parker, along with excerpts from interview with the workers.
• The Founding Fish by John McPhee (Farrar Straus Giroux).  McPhee's usual masterful blend of science, history, sociology, and personal anecdotes, with a type of fish -- American shad -- as the common thread.  At the end of a book that exudes a love of fishing, McPhee surprisingly closes with a strong argument that sport fishing is cruel and that "catch and release" does not lessen that cruelty.
• Doghouse Roses by Steve Earle (Houghton Mifflin).  An exceptionally well written set of socially conscious but not propagandistic short stories by one of America's best singer-songwriters.  Don't miss it.
• Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis by Phyllis Bennis (Interlink).  A guide from one of the most active critics of U.S. policies that she argues helped contribute to the September 11th attacks, and a discussion of policy options now.
• Grow Faster Together...or Grow Slowly Apart: How Will America Work in the 21st Century by the Aspen Institute Domestic Strategy Group.  The report, found at www.aspeninstitute.org/dsg, is a product of a task force of prominent Republicans and Democrats, including a number of top business leaders, which recognizes the need to "make work pay," improve worker skills, restore workers' security, provide a more family-friendly workplace, and rethink immigration policy.
• Financialization of Daily Life by Randy Martin (Temple University Press).  Examines the impact on personal and family life, society, and our modes of thought as public policy and the media encourage the perception that more Americans can achieve happiness through financial investments.
• Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century edited by Herb Boyd (South End Press).  Commentary by well known activists on a wide range of subjects including environmental justice, gender issues, prisons, Africa policy, reparations, music, and media coverage.
• Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy (HarperCollins).  An engaging profile of one of baseball's all-time greats, exploring, for example, the anti-Semitism he faced, his relationships with African American players, and the two-person strike he and Don Drysdale waged before the 1966 season that helped change labor relations in professional sports.
• Building Unions: Past, Present, and Future by Peter Kellman (POCLAD).  A 36-page booklet that gives an overview of the evolution of American labor laws, showing that "the law" is not neutral but is often shaped by corporate power.
• Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo (University of Texas Press). A special English edition of one of Mexico's most famous novels, presented with surreal photographs of rural Mexico by Josephine Sacabo.
• God's Country or Devil's Playground edited by Barney Nelson (University of Texas Press).  A collection of writings about the Big Bend country shared by the U.S. and Mexico.
• Understanding Mainland Puerto Rican Poverty by Susan S. Baker (Temple University Press).  Compares Puerto Rican experiences to those of other Hispanics and of African Americans, and compares Puerto Ricans in New York to Puerto Ricans in other parts of the mainland.
• Cosmic Canticle by Ernesto Cardenal (Curbstone).  A very unusual, 481-page prose poem that mixes thoughts about human evolution, people's place in the universe, and Latin American history by a priest who was minister of culture in Nicaragua's Sandinista regime.
• The Vanishing Voter by Thomas E. Patterson (Knopf).  Combines the results of 80,000 interviews with other evidence to examine reasons for declining participation in elections.
• Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz by Paul Buhle with Mike Alewitz.  A beautifully designed book that shows much of Alewitz's art and Buhle's take on the left history that Alewitz has been part of.
• Art on the Line edited by Jack Hirschman (Curbstone).  Essays by a diverse group of artists about their art and their activism.
• Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions by Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin (Cambridge University Press).  A study of the role of Communist activists in the labor, from the rise of the CIO to the McCarthy era after World War II.
• Left Out: The Politics of Exclusion by Martin Duberman (South End Press).  Collected essays from nearly 30 years on race, sexuality, foreign policy, and campus activism.
• The Wished-for Country by Wayne Karlin (Curbstone).  A grim vision of the brutality of life during the founding of the American colonies.
• Tin Men by Archie Green (University of Illinois Press).  Pictures of sculptures made by sheet metal workers, plus Green's account of the people who made them and the stories they tell.
• The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez by Jimmy Breslin (Crown).  An admirable work of journalism that makes fascinating reading.  After an immigrant worker died a horrible, preventable death on a nonunion construction job in New York, Breslin did the hard work of reconstructing in moving, human detail Gutierrez's life in his Mexican hometown, his journey across the border, and his death caused in no small measure by the continued denial of legal status to hard-working immigrants who play a key role in the U.S. economy.
• Bleeding the Patient: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care by David Himmelstein, Steffie Woolhandler, and Ida Hellander (Common Courage).  A highly readable guide to what's wrong with the U.S. health care system, filled with dozens of revealing graphs.
• Si, Se Puede/Yes, We Can by Diana Cohn and Francisco Delgado (Cinco Puntos).  A children's book based on the janitor's strike in Los Angeles in 2000.  The illustrations are the strongest element.
• A Whale Hunt: How a Native American Village Did What No One Thought They Could by Robert Sullivan (Touchstone). A well-told story of what happened when the Macaw tribe of northwest Washington state decided to resume whale hunting after many generations had lost that cultural tradition.  Shows the ships-passing-in-the-night clash between the tribe and hard-line environmentalists.
• Living Wage Now: A Guide to Building a Movement and Winning a Living Wage for Workers at Your School (Student Labor Action Project, Harvard Living Wage Campaign, and Service Employees International Union) is a practical guide to organizing campaigns to raise pay for low-wage workers on college campuses. Occupation (enmassefillms.org) is a film that tells the story of the successful living wage campaign at Harvard.
• Students Against Sweatshops by Liza Featherstone and United Students Against Sweatshops (Verso).  A report on and analysis of the movement that has energized a new generation of activists and led many to campaigns on domestic issues such as Justice for Janitors.
• Echando Raices/Taking Root, American Friends Service Committee (takingroot.org) is an hour-long video in three parts, each of which tells the story of communities with large numbers of recent immigrants.  A discussion guide accompanies it to help plan discussions about who benefits when immigrants are divided among themselves or from native-born groups.
• A Short History of the U.S. Working Class by Paul Le Blanc (Humanity).  Mostly a short history of unionism in the U.S.
• U.S. Labor in the Twentieth Century edited by John Hinshaw and Paul Le Blanc (Humanity).  A collection of essays by leading academics in the field of working class studies.
• The State of Working America 2002-2003 (Economic Policy Institute).  The useful reference book full of economic statistics and analysis that EPI puts out every two years.
• Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories by Lorraine Lopez (Curbstone).  A collection of mostly good short stories that explore issues of identity in Latino communities.
• I'd Rather Teach Peace by Colman McCarthy (Orbis).  McCarthy has touched the lives of thousands of students in high schools, universities, and prisons who have taken his specially designed courses about working for peace and justice.  This is his account of his experiences.
• Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press edited by Kristina Borjesson ((Prometheus Books).  18 chapters -- nearly all first-hand, insider accounts by journalists who faced censorship and paid a personal price for trying to air stories about government and corporate wrongdoing.
• Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (The New Press).  In the McCarthy era, anti-communist politicians charged that leftwing filmmakers in Hollywood were shaping popular movies according to their political beliefs.  Now, Buhle and Wagner say they were right: many famous movies were affected by left filmmakers' views of the world.
• My Mother's Island by Marnie Mueller (Curbstone) is a well-written, honest, emotional account of her mother's death.
• Brown Glass Windows by devorah major (Curbstone) is a novel set in the Fillmore District of San Francisco that once was an African-American cultural center.
• Writing the Wrongs: Eva Valesh and the Rise of Labor Journalism by Elizabeth Faue (Cornell University Press).  This story of one labor activist and her right-ward drift during her life shines a light on choices that challenged union activists in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
• Trajectory of Change by Michael Albert (South End Press).  A collection of columns with an underlying theme that left movements must connect better with working people.
• Lost Ground: Welfare Reform, Poverty, and Beyond edited by Randy Albelda and Ann Withorn (South End Press).  Argues that welfare "reform" has created more problems than it has solved.
• The Package Deal: Marriage, Work, and Fatherhood in Men's Lives by Nicholas Townsend (Temple University Press).  Looks at how a group of men cope with combining work and family.
• The Sign of the Burger: McDonald's and the Culture of Power by Joe L. Kincheloe (Temple University Press).  Examines McDonald's as a window into consumerism, globalization, and the worldwide spread of American corporate culture.  Interesting facts and analysis laced from time to time with academic jargon.
• The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy edited by Charles D. Thompson, Jr., and Melinda F. Wiggins (University of Texas Press).  A detailed look at a wide range of issues facing farmworkers, interspersed with short personal statements by workers and activists.
• Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago by David Naguib Pellow (MIT Press) uses Chicago as a case study to examine complex class and race issues related to recycling and other waste disposal.
• The Democracy Owners' Manual: A Practical Guide to Changing the World by Jim Shultz (Rutgers University Press).  How-to advice about analyzing public policies and budgets and developing social change strategies and coalitions.
• Unions in a Globalized Environment: Changing Borders, Organizational Boundaries, and Social Roles edited by Bruce Nissen (M.E. Sharpe).  Looks at a variety of cross-border projects and immigrant organizing that U.S. unions have been involved in.
• Global Backlash: Citizen Initiatives for a Just World Economy edited by Robin Broad (Rowman and Littlefield). A collection of articles and documents that give voice to a variety of alternatives to corporate-controlled globalization.
• Taking the High Road: Communities Organize for Economic Change by David B. Reynolds (M.E. Sharpe).  A look at a variety of social change movements in the U.S. and Europe.
• Coal Miner's Holiday by Kiki DeLancey (Sarabande).  Short stories set in small Ohio towns.
• Which Side Are You On?: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39 by John W. Hevener.  Story of the initial unionization of the area.
• The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present by E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller (Rutgers University Press).  Argues that mental illness has been on the rise in the past 250 years and speculates about possible reasons.
• Working Writers, Workers Education Program, 21 Fellows Street, Boston, MA 02119 ($5 including postage).  More than a hundred short autobiographical writings by nursing home workers and other members of SEIU Local 285 in Massachusetts.
• The Water Carrier by Steve Straight, Curbstone.  An excellent collection of poems.  Straight has a light touch and a knack for poignantly illuminating the human effects of class differences.
• Six Kinds of Sky by Luis Alberto Urrea, Cinco Puntos Press.  A collection of short fiction by a native of Tijuana whose stories provide a memorable and often humorous window into border life.
• Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning by Chester Hartman, Center for Urban Policy Research Press.  The collected works of the urban planner and activist who is now director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, which links academics with community groups for joint projects. The collection is Introduced by an autobiographical essay.
• Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People by Jack Shaheen, Interlink.  A timely, exhaustive look at negative stereotypes of Arabs in more than 900 films.
• Policing the National Body: Race, Gender, and Criminalization edited by Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee.  A collection of essays that start from the premise that many environmental and reproductive rights organizations do not have an adequate race and class perspective.
• How Wall Street Created a Nation: J.P. Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt, and the Panama Canal by Ovidio Diaz Espino, Four Walls Eight Windows.  This story of the creation of the Panama Canal and the nation of Panama provides a case study of how financial and political interests combine to determine and profit from U.S. foreign policy.
• Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth by Lester R. Brown, Norton.  A comprehensive look at the interrelationship in the world today between economics and ecology.  May be downloaded free at www.earth-policy.org.
• Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit by Vandana Shiva, South End Press.  The environmental activist from India examines how water rights have been taken over by private interests and how battles over water play a part in conflicts throughout the world.
• Past Continuous by Nguyen Khai, Curbstone.  Intended to be a "documentary novel," it tells the story of the war in Vietnam and its aftermath from the point of view of three characters who lived through it: a North Vietnamese secret agent, a female Viet Cong commander, and a Vietnamese Catholic priest.
• 6 Vietnamese Poets edited by Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen, Curbstone.  Poems by three women and three men that record the human cost of the war.
• The New World by George Evans, Curbstone.  Poems about the war in Vietnam and its aftermath.
• The Violent Foam by Daisy Zamora, Curbstone.  A collection of feminist poetry by the Nicaraguan activist, provided in the original Spanish with English translations.
• The Return of the River by Roberto Sosa, Curbstone.  A bilingual edition with selections from the Honduran poet's previous books.
• State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein, Princeton University Press.  In a thoughtful attempt to shed some light on what it might take to once again make the labor movement a central part of American public life, Lichtenstein traces the interplay between broad social trends and the labor movement's changing role in society over the past hundred years.  He argues that bolder action and risk taking, increased union democracy and member participation, and more independent political action are three keys to restoring labor as a social and political force.  This book will become standard reading for anyone who wants a basic history of American labor that provides not only names and dates but a framework for understanding.
• Muckraking!: Journalism That Changed America edited by Judith and William Serrin, The New Press.  An anthology of more than 125 examples of some of the best of American investigative journalism since the country's founding.  Examples are draw from reporting on issues and problems affecting working people, public health, civil and women's rights, the environment, prisons, sports, and more.  The collection has the side benefit of providing a fascinating eyewitness tour through American history.  Other books have covered what is wrong with journalism today, the editors write.  "What we hope to do is to remind journalists, historians, and the readers and viewers in whose name journalists act that doing journalism is honorable and that honorable journalism can do good."  [Full disclosure: an article I wrote for the United Mine Workers Journal in the 1970s is included in the book. -- MW]
• Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People by Arlene Davila, University of California Press.  A behind-the-scenes look at how advertisers and the media have combined to try to mold a diverse population of Hispanic origin into a homogenous blend of consumers.
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, Houghton Mifflin.  A highly readable investigation into the impact of the fast food industry on health, culture, consumers, and working people in the U.S. and abroad.
• You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization by Elliott D. Sclar, Cornell University Press. A key resource for anyone who wants to understand the attempt by corporations to take over potentially profitable public services.
• Jews for Buchanan by John Nichols, The New Press.  A lively record of the "theft of the American presidency" in Florida in 2000.  Particularly important in terms of future reforms is the section on the systematic effort to deny the voting rights of African Americans and Latinos.
• Political Fictions by Joan Didion, Knopf.  Analysis of how far the American political and electoral system is from being democratic.  Also takes a sharp look at how the news media contribute to that "disconnect" between the political system and the general public.
• Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution by Manuel Plana, Interlink.  One in a series that also includes histories of Gandhi and India, Hitler and Nazism, Middle East Conflicts, the Spanish Civil War, and other topics.
• All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools Through Public School Choice by Richard D. Kahlenberg, Brookings.  Kahlenberg is an articulate advocate for the view that education for poor children cannot be significantly improved through increased spending, improved standards, racial integration, or private school vouchers.  Instead, he says the best proven remedy is economic integration.  Poor students who attend middle-class schools increase their academic achievement, he reports, citing examples from three school systems.
• Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century by Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, University Press of Kansas.  Documents the interrelated problems of growing economic segregation, urban poverty, and suburban sprawl.  Shows how public policies have contributed to these problems, and offers policy alternatives.  Argues that a political coalition of suburban and urban dwellers based on common interests can be built.
• Color Lines: Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America edited by John David Skrentny, University of Chicago.  A collection which looks at how issues of race and immigration are interrelated and affected by changing demographics.  Includes examples from other countries as well as the U.S.
• Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement Among Grassroots Activists by Stephen Hart, University of Chicago Press.  Argues that the left often loses to the right by failing to ground campaigns in moral and cultural values.  The way people engage in politics is as important as the content of the issues, he says, using several case studies.
• We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard by John Hoerr, Temple University Press.  A detailed, readable account of an organizing drive by Harvard's clerical workers that took two decades to be successful.
• Who Rules America?: Power and Politics by G. William Domhoff, McGraw Hill.  A new edition of a basic primer on class, corporate power, the shaping of public opinion, the control of government, and other issues.
• Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry edited by Paul Laraque and Jack Hirschman, Curbstone.  A good resource for Americans who know about Haiti's politics and economics but not about its culture.
• A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee, Riverhead.  Another unusual novel by the author of "Native Speaker."  A retirement-aged Japanese man of Korean birth who lives in a suburb of New York takes a new look at his relationships with people in the town, his adopted daughter, and "comfort women" he knew as a soldier in the Japanese army during World War II.
• The Widening Gap: Why America's Working Families are in Jeopardy - and What Can Be Done by Jody Heymann, Basic Books.  An in-depth look at policies that affect working families.
• The Rackets by Thomas Kelly, Farrar Straus and Giroux.  A novel about Teamster elections, mobsters, and the feds.
• The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repression in America by Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, University of California Press.  Interviews and first-person accounts with participants in the labor, civil rights, and anti-war movements.
• Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered by Jack Metzgar, Temple.  A professor whose father was a Steelworkers shop steward looks back at the history of his family, the industry, and the union.
• After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy by Seymour Melman, Knopf. Argues that there are similarities between contradictions that arose in the Soviet Union's planned economy and in America's corporate dominated system today.
• Mexico City: A Cultural and Literary Companion by Nick Caistor, Interlink Books.  A quality guide to the capital of a country that by the day becomes more closely linked to the U.S.
• Pete Seeger's Storytelling Book by Pete Seeger and Paul Dubois Jacobs, Harcourt.  Seeger's favorite stories, plus thoughts about storytelling.  Good ideas for teachers and parents of young children.
• Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America edited by Chester Hartman, M.E. Sharpe.  99 articles from Poverty & Race, the bimonthly bulletin of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council.  Provocative debates on such subjects as integration and education reform.
• What We Hold in Common: An Introduction to Working Class Studies edited by Janet Zandy, Feminist Press. An indispensable resource for anyone who wants to teach about working class life and literature.
• Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation by Michael H. Belzer, Oxford.  A study by a former truck driver who is now a professor at the University of Michigan.  Useful examination of how workers in one industry have been affected as standards once maintained with help from public policy have been destroyed by market forces.
• Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans by Stephen Franklin, Guilford.  An up-close-and-personal account of union defeats in Decatur, Illinois,  during the 1990s at the hands of Bridgestone/Firestone, Caterpillar, and A.E. Staley.
• Made in Indonesia: Indonesian Workers Since Suharto by Dan La Botz, South End Press.  Dan La Botz, who has written a number of useful books about Mexico, now turns his attention to Indonesia, the world's fourth largest country and a major producer for the U.S. market.
• Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take on the Global Factory by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, South End Press.  The story of Chinese, Korean, and Mexican immigrant women active in community-based organizing projects in the U.S.  Draws heavily on interviews and personal accounts.
• Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the 21st Century edited by Lowell Turner, Harry C. Katz, and Richard W. Hurd, Cornell.  Another in the growing series of anthologies about new strategies for labor in the Sweeney era.
• From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short Illustrated History of Labor in the United States by Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty, The New Press.  American history retold from a working class perspective.
• Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It by Joan Williams, Oxford.  Explores policy alternatives that would benefit both parents and children.
• American Foundations: An Investigative History by Mark Dowie, MIT Press.  Documents the influence foundations wield.  Proposes more public input.
• The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder by Mark Crispin Miller, W.W. Norton.  Bush's famous verbal missteps reveal the man and the ideology behind them.
• The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders by C. Wright Mills, University of Illinois.  Reissue of a book first published in 1948, with a new introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein.  Despite the title, it was an analysis of the labor movement itself, not just its top leaders.  Reading it now gives interesting perspective on the roots of the challenges labor faces today.
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books.  Ehrenreich spent part of year working in low-wage service jobs -- waitress, hotel and house cleaning, nursing home aide, and Wal-Mart sales clerk -- and living on that income in order to capture in detail the texture of daily life for the women and men who make at or near minimum wage. The result is a vivid portrait of the relentless stress and uncertainty they feel as they cope with the work and the difficult struggle to obtain transportation, housing, food, and health care. Should be must reading for everyone who doesn't face these challenges and for whom these workers are invisible.
• Disappearing Act: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work by Joyce K. Fletcher, MIT Press.  The worker of the future must be a team player with the ability to work effectively with others.  But are those traits actually rewarded in most organizations?  Fletcher uses observation of interactions in a particular workplace to argue that the answer is no.
• Last Refuge of Scoundrels: A Revolutionary Novel by Paul Lussier, Warner Books.  The author did a great deal of research about both the wealthy men who gained fame as a result of the American Revolution and the working people who carried it out.  But his attempt to provide an alternative narrative of those events is ultimately frustrating because of the choice of a novel as his format, resulting in readers not knowing which of his revelations are fact and which are fiction.
• Youth at Work: The Unionized Fast-food and Grocery Workplace by Stuart Tannock, Temple University Press.  Through interviews with nearly a hundred young unionized workers in two cities -- one in the U.S. and one in Canada -- Tannock provides a detailed look at work issues and culture and at their experiences with the unions that cover them.
• Immigration and American Unionism by Vernon M. Briggs Jr., Cornell University Press.  A history which argues that the new strategy of some unions to actively advocate for the rights and needs of immigrant workers constitutes a "surrender" that will undermine the security of the native-born.
• American Foundations: An Investigative History by Mark Dowie, MIT Press. Looks at the role these nondemocratic institutions play in setting and limiting public policy debate.
• Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability by C.A. Bowers, University of Georgia Press.  Proposes alternative ways to teach about computers.
• The Heat: Steelworker Lives and Legends, Institute for Career Development (1-888-291-8003 or www.icd-uswasteelco.org). A collection of short stories and poems by 15 steelworkers from Gary and Baltimore.  Many of the pieces are both moving and well written.  In general, this is not just good working class literature but good literature, period.
• Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction by Laura Hapke, Rutgers University Press.  An ambitious, detailed review of the treatment of workers in American fiction from the 1840s through the 1990s.  A great guide to a world of often little-known literature waiting to be explored.
• Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr.  Combines the story of Moses' involvement with the civil rights movement in the South with an account of the Algebra Project which Moses founded to promote math literacy for all.
• How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley by Sara Miles.  An inside look at how a political alliance was formed.
• Everything You Think You Know About Politics...And Why You're Wrong by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Basic Books. A collection of summaries of recent studies about political advertising and other aspects of political campaigns by researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  She reports, for example, that most voters do not consider TV ads with attacks on an opponent to be "negative ads" if they also include positive statements about what the sponsoring candidate favors.
• The Critical Study of Work: Labor, Technology, and Global Production by Rick Baldoz, Charles Koeber, and Philip Kraft, Temple University Press.  A collection of essays.
• The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan by Myra Strober and Agnes Miling Kaneko Chan, MIT Press.  Compares the lives of 1981 graduates of two elite institutions, Stanford University and Tokyo University, with a focus on gender issues.
• The Triangle Fire by Leon Stein, Cornell University Press.  Reissue of an account of the 1911 fire that killed 146 sweatshop workers.
• The Future of Success by Robert B. Reich, Knopf.  Long on description of the strains caused by commercialization of modern life, but short on solutions.
• Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne, University of Texas Press.  Focuses on  a 1945 strike in Hollywood and a lockout the following year.
• Environmentalism Unbound by Robert Gottlieb, MIT Press. Makes a powerful argument that environmentalists must expand their concerns to include workplace safety, healthy communities, and food security.  Uses three case studies.
• A World to Win by Jack Conroy, and Lamps at High Noon by Jack S. Balch. Two more novels in the series, The Radical Novel Reconsidered, published by University of Illinois Press.  The series reprints novels by radical writers in the 1930s and 1940s.  The best of the series so far is To Make My Bread by Grace Lumpkin, which was republished in 1995.  It told the story of a family of Appalachian mountaineers who were driven off their land into a mill town.
• The New Rank and File edited by Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd, Cornell University Press.  A collection of interviews with union activists in the U.S. and abroad.  Some come from working class backgrounds; others are intellectuals who took jobs where they hoped to organize workers.  The controversial underlying perspective is that national unions are not a vehicle to achieving power for working people but rather an obstacle to grassroots democracy.
• The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards by Alan Tonelson, Westview Press.
• Building More Effective Unions by Paul F. Clark, Cornell University Press.  Applies principles of behavioral science to an examination of how unions operate.
• Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet by Martha Shirk, Neil G. Bennett, and J. Lawrence Aber, Westview Press. Journalistic profiles of ten poor families are designed to give an overview of poverty in America today.
• How Do We Tell the Workers?: The Socioeconomic Foundations of Work and Vocational Education by Joe L. Kincheloe, Westview Press.  An analysis of how workers are taught to fulfill their role in today's economic system.
• In the South Bronx of America by Mel Rosenthal, Curbstone Press. Powerful photographs and text.
• Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives: A Pictorial History of Working People in New York City by Debra Bernhardt and Rachel Bernstein, NYU Press.

• Allies Across the Border: Mexico's "Authentic Labor Front" and Global Solidarity by Dale Hathaway, South End Press.  If there is one book you should read to know something about the labor movement in Mexico today, this is it.  When I lived in Mexico for two years from 1989 to 1991, the Authentic Labor Front, known by its Spanish initials as F.A.T., was the group I found one could count on most for honesty, consistency of purpose, and commitment to principled coalition building rather than sectarian self-promotion.  Hathaway has written a thorough and interesting account of this independent, democratic labor group that has survived for 40 years, and in the process he gives a good overview of Mexican labor today.
• Against the Flood by Ma Van Khang, Curbstone Press. A beautifully written novel that gives an interesting perspective on life in today's Vietnam.
• American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde, W.W. Norton.  This biography of a man who ran for president as a third party progressive in 1948 after serving as Franklin Roosevelt's vice president makes interesting reading in light of the current debate about the role of Ralph Nader's
• candidacy in the recent election.
• America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters by Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, Basic Books.  An analysis by two progressives that tries to shed light on the trends reflected in Al Gore's inability to win a majority of white votes.  They argue that rather than moving to the timid center, Democratic politicians need to be more boldly progressive if they hope to build a true majority coalition across racial and ethnic lines.
• Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements by James Green, University of Massachusetts Press.  A combination of autobiography and history.
• Drive-By Journalism: The Assault on Your Need to Know by Arthur Rowse, Common Courage Press. Rowse is a veteran media critic who worked for U.S. News and World Report, Boston Globe, and the Washington Post.
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum, Common Courage Press.  Applies to the U.S. the standards that American government officials apply to "terrorist" nations.
• Consumer Society in American History edited by Lawrence B. Glickman, Cornell University Press. A collection of essays that shows how ideas about and patterns of consumerism have changed in different eras.
• The Fat of the Land: The Garbage in New York -- The Last Two Hundred Years by Benjamin Miller, Four Walls Eight Windows.  Miller is former director of policy planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation.  He uses the subject of garbage to explore urban history, economics, and politics.
• Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City by Mike Davis, Verso.
• The Drive-In, The Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 by Richard Longstreth, MIT Press.
• Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, Brendan Smith, South End Press.
• One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy by Thomas Frank, Doubleday.
• Temps: The Many Faces of the Changing Workplace by Jackie Krasas Rogers, Cornell University Press.  Explores the human side of temping and looks at issues of race, gender, and power.
• Economic Apartheid in America by Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel, The New Press.  A primer on economic inequality and insecurity.
• The Business of Journalism edited by William Serrin, The New Press.  Ten leading reporters and editors talk from personal experience about changes in today's media.  Contributors include Ronnie Dugger, Pat and Tom Gish, Jay Harris, John Leonard, Sydney Schanberg, E.R. Shipp, Jim Warren, and Vanessa Williams.
• The Myth of the Liberal Media by Edward Herman, Peter Lang Publishing.
• America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press.  A survey of the political, social, and cultural history of 1960s America.
• The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen, Viking.
• Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy by Grace Chang, South End Press.
• Laboring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity Across Nations edited by Gerald Hunt, Temple University Press.