Politics & Government

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Shogun is a 1975 novel by American author James Clavell. It is one of six books in Clavell’s Asian Saga, which chronicles the ways Europeans interacted with countries in Asia from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The novel tells the story of English ship pilot John Blackthorne, loosely based on the real life navigator William Adams, who becomes intimately involved in the rise to power of Yoshi Toranaga, a fictionalized version of Tokugawa Ieyasu... Read Shogun Summary

“Shooting an Elephant,” is an essay by British author George Orwell, first published in the magazine New Writing in 1936. Orwell, born Eric Blair, is world-renowned for his sociopolitical commentary. He served as a British officer in Burma from 1922 to 1927, then worked as a journalist, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist for the remainder of his career, going on to produce celebrated works such as Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Before penning this... Read Shooting an Elephant Summary

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Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is widely regarded as a foundational text of the 20th century environmental movement. Originally published as a series in The New Yorker, Carson’s essays carefully articulate the impacts of widespread chemical use for insect and plant control. Throughout the text, Carson emphasizes the ways that humans disregard the interrelation of species on earth, and argues that as a result, humans are at a pivotal moment. If methods of insect control are... Read Silent Spring Summary

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Written by American journalist Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) is a thorough account of the forms of slavery perpetuated by economic disempowerment in the South after the Civil War up to World War II. The book addresses themes like The Intentional Revival of Slavery, The Toxic Mix of White Mythology and Naïve Racism, and Challenges of Confronting the Past. Slavery... Read Slavery by Another Name Summary

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Solitary (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2019) is a memoir by the activist Albert Woodfox that recounts more than four decades in solitary confinement, largely at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. It was nominated for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Woodfox describes how the poverty and racism he endured growing up led him into crime, how the racism of individuals and institutions turned his initial... Read Solitary Summary

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book... Read Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

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Son of the Revolution (1983), written by Liang Heng with his wife, Judith Shapiro, is a memoir of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and is both the story of Liang’s own coming-of-age and a chronicle of China’s political and cultural upheaval following the Communist Party’s rise to power in the mid-1900s.Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to violence and death by suicide.Liang Heng is born in Changsha, a large city in central... Read Son of the Revolution Summary

Harvard history professor Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) explicates the central role of the 19th century New Orleans slave market in supporting the Southern slave trade. Johnson’s main contention is that slavery was a tragic “byproduct” of the sugar, tobacco, and cotton industries. Johnson pairs primary sources, such as slave accounts, with bills of sale and slaveholder correspondence in his reconstruction of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson shows... Read Soul by Soul Summary

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So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book written by Ijeoma Oluo, an American author of Nigerian descent whose columns and news articles on race have appeared in The Guardian, The Stranger, and Jezebel, among other places. This guide refers to the first edition published in 2018 by Seal Press. The title gestures to the discourse that is necessary to combat racial oppression in the United States. The book made Bustle’s... Read So You Want to Talk About Race Summary

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