Contemporary Books on Social Justice

On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, PhD, describes how tyrants have dismantled 20th-century republics and replaced them with totalitarian regimes, and how threats to democracies still exist today, including in America. Published in 2017, On Tyranny holds the distinction of being a #1 New York Times bestseller. Dr. Snyder is a Yale professor of European history. His short and pithy book details the methods that demagogues, including Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, have used to degrade... Read On Tyranny Summary

Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, chronicles the 13 months she spent in a federal women’s prison in Danbury, Connecticut. In 2013, Netflix adapted the memoir into an original series featuring the experiences of fictional character Piper Chapman. The memoir follows a linear timeline, starting with the crime Kerman unknowingly commits right after college, the process leading up to the sentencing, and her time in Danbury... Read Orange Is The New Black Summary

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In Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (2015), author Robert D. Putnam describes how unattainable upward social mobility, or the American Dream, is for most young people. Putnam examines the factors that encourage or discourage upward mobility and how they have changed over time. The book was well-received by critics for its honest and timely commentary on important social issues. Putnam currently works as both a political scientist and a professor of public policy... Read Our Kids Summary

Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed develops a theory of education fitted to the needs of the disenfranchised and marginalized members of capitalist societies. Combining educational and political philosophy, the book offers an analysis of oppression and a theory of liberation. Freire believes that traditional education serves to support the dominance of the powerful within society and thereby maintain the powerful’s social, political, and economic status quo. To overcome the oppression endemic to an exploitative... Read Pedagogy of the Oppressed Summary

Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, published in 2019, is a Speculative Fiction/Fantasy novel intended for Young Adult readers. Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time, Pet was also a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The novel received the Stonewall Book Award, which recognizes achievement in LGBTQIA+ literature. Emezi, a non-binary Nigerian Igbo and Tamil writer who uses they/them pronouns, is also the author of two novels... Read Pet Summary

Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption is a 2009 memoir written by Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino. The coauthors share a unique relationship. When she was 22, Jennifer mistakenly identified Ronald as the man who raped her in her apartment. He was wrongfully convicted and spent 11 years in prison before being exonerated by DNA testing. Together, they tell their story, which explores themes of Victimization, Guilt, and Shame; The Unreliability of Eyewitness... Read Picking Cotton Summary

The debut novel of British author Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (commonly known as The Pickwick Papers) was first published as a series by Chapman and Hall between 1836 and 1837. The Pickwick Papers chronicles the adventures of the members of the Pickwick Club, a group of travelers who journey around England and share their experiences. Because of the original serial format of the novel, the chapters contain individual but interconnected... Read Pickwick Papers Summary

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Planet of Slums is a non-fiction book published in 2006 by American author and urban theorist Mike Davis. It chronicles the spread of poverty in cities around the world at a time when more than a billion people live in what the United Nations (UN) classifies as "slums."SummaryIn 1950, only 86 cities around the world had populations of one million people or more. When Davis wrote this book in 2005, he predicted that by 2015... Read Planet of Slums Summary

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is an adaptation of three lectures that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison delivered at the Massey Lectures at Harvard University in 1990. She turned the three-part series into a 91-page book, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press. The lectures concern issues of race in American literature and the ways that writers actively construct whiteness and blackness within literature. Morrison examines the claim that works in the... Read Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Summary

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