Contemporary Books on Social Justice

Written by Diane Glancy in 1996, Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears follows a group of Cherokee people as they are forced to relocate to “Indian Territory” in Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839. The novel is told from varying perspectives of members of the Cherokee Nation as well as soldiers, reverends, and disembodied voices. These shifting perspectives create a fragmented yet nuanced narrative as Glancy weaves together multiple viewpoints and utilizes... Read Pushing the Bear Summary

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Published in 1999 by historian and professor Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie is a work of biographical nonfiction about the life of civil rights leader Robert F. Williams. A controversial figure within the movement, Williams is best remembered for his advocation of armed self-defense in the struggle for Black liberation. In Radio Free Dixie, Tyson charts Williams’s rise to prominence against the sociopolitical and cultural influences that guided the evolution of the civil rights... Read Radio Free Dixie Summary

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Random Family was published in 2003 and is the product of a decade of research and interviews by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It mainly focuses on two Puerto Rican teenagers, Coco Rodriguez and Jessica Martinez, who are fifteen and sixteen, respectively, when the narrative begins.Jessica is the daughter of Lourdes, and when we are first introduced to her, she is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives on Tremont Avenue, a particularly desolate area in the Bronx. Simultaneously... Read Random Family Summary

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Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky evaluates the rise of income inequality in the US over the last 40 years. It argues that the main consequence of neoliberalism, which has increased since the 1970s, is a dramatic concentration of wealth and power to the elite—at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Chomsky observes how rapid financialization since the... Read Requiem for the American Dream Summary

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Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (2018) is a biography of disavowed white nationalist Derek Black, authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow.Derek is a former white nationalist wunderkind. Derek is the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Stormfront online hate group creator, Don Black, and the godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, white supremacist politician, and notorious public figure, David Duke. Derek’s parents remove... Read Rising Out of Hatred Summary

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Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, Savage Inequalities, is a critical look at the American educational system and its failures. The main argument of the book is that a tremendous divide exists between rich and poor in education, a divide intensified by ethnic and racial prejudice. Kozol claims that in many communities and localities, American schools remain effectively segregated, more than 50 years after the criminalization of such practices. Kozol argues that while the letter of the... Read Savage Inequalities Summary

Schindler’s List (originally titled Schindler’s Ark) is a 1982 historical novel by Australian author Thomas Keneally. It tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party who used his position as a German industrialist to save more than 1,200 people’s lives during the war. In protecting as many people as he could from the genocidal Nazi regime, Schindler risked being sent to a concentration camp himself. Keneally wrote the novel with the... Read Schindler's List Summary

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