Contemporary Books on Social Justice

In 2009, Peter Singer, philosopher and ethicist at Princeton University, published The Life You Can Save, a short treatise on the obligations of affluent persons to alleviate the suffering of those experiencing extreme poverty on a global scale. By this time in his career, Singer had spent several decades on ethical questions related to global poverty. In 1972, he produced a seminal essay in the field, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” After a much more recent... Read The Life You Can Save Summary

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Michael Connelly is a prolific New York Times bestselling author. His legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer, won the Shamus Award and Macavity Award in 2006. The book was then successfully adapted to film. Connelly is widely regarded as one of the best American mystery writers. Other works by this author include The Black Echo, The Drop, and The Fifth Witness.This guide refers to the 2005 Hieronymus, Inc. edition.Plot SummaryMichael “Mick” Haller is a criminal defense... Read The Lincoln Lawyer Summary

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú is a work of literary nonfiction published in 2018. It was a New York Times best-seller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Current Interest, and was named a Top 10 Book of 2018 by NPR and The Washington Post. The book combines memoir with history, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to... Read The Line Becomes a River Summary

The Long Loneliness, by Dorothy Day, is a memoir about Day’s lifelong relationship with Christianity, and how it pulled her away from communism and socialism toward a movement that combined political theory with Christian love and community. The memoir also tells the story about how her devotion to Catholicism allowed her to meet Peter Maurin, another devoted Catholic and liberal who created part of the theoretical basis of the Catholic Worker Movement.Day begins her book... Read The Long Loneliness Summary

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The Massacre at El Mozote, by Mark Danner, which in its first iteration appeared as a series of articles for The New Yorker, is an in-depth investigation into the events of December 1981 in the small town of El Mozote in northern El Salvador, during the country’s long civil war. Danner proceeds to not only bring these events to light, but also to place them in the global context of the Cold War of the... Read The Massacre at El Mozote Summary

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The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a much-beloved adventure novel by Howard Pyle (1853-1911), published in 1883. Pyle, an American illustrator and children’s author, wove together several of the early ballads about the famed medieval outlaw Robin Hood and his companions, the Merry Men, in an episodic and entertaining plot aimed at young readers of the late nineteenth century. Written in a pseudo-archaic English actually modeled on Elizabethan-era English, the book reflects a colorful... Read The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood Summary

Carter Godwin Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro is a social critique that addresses the inherent structural and institutional racism represented by the United States education system. Originally written and published in 1933, this study guide refers to a republication of the text from 2010 by IAP (Las Vegas, Nevada). The book traces Woodson’s arguments regarding how the United States education system reproduces White supremacy and fails to educate Black students; this failure, Woodson contends... Read The Mis-Education of the Negro Summary

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In Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” the writer presents his argument regarding the creative limitations Black Americans face. Initially published in 1926, the essay traces a short, powerful argument that relies both on Hughes’s own identity as an artist as well as his critical observations of US society. As a Black author writing in the early 20th century, Hughes uses the terms “Negro” and “black” interchangeably; this study guide exclusively uses... Read The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain Summary

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a nonfiction book published in 2010 by American author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander. The book argues that the War on Drugs and mass incarceration operate as tools of racialized social control and oppression, not unlike the system in place during the Jim Crow era in the American South. The winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction, The New Jim Crow continues... Read The New Jim Crow Summary

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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (First Mariners Books edition 2017) by Andrés Reséndez, a Mexican historian working at the University of California Davis, won the 2017 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In this book, Reséndez dispels the myth that only African slaves faced enslavement in the Americas. He focuses on Indigenous slaves in the Caribbean, central and northern Mexico, and the American Southwest... Read The Other Slavery Summary