Contemporary Books on Social Justice

The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a nonfiction book by Jill Lepore, published in 2014. It falls into the categories of history, comics, women’s studies, and biography, and won the American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society. Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. This guide was written from the hardcover first edition.SummaryThe first section, called “Veritas,” includes nine... Read The Secret History of Wonder Woman Summary

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Philosopher Peter Singer, known for his uncompromising commitment to utilitarian principles, published his opinion editorial “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” in The New York Times Magazine on 5 September 1999. In the essay, Singer argues that the inhabitants of affluent countries have a moral obligation to donate a significant portion of their wealth to charities that can save lives around the world.Singer begins by describing a situation from the 1998 Brazilian film Central Station... Read The Singer Solution to World Poverty Summary

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Published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is an important contribution to African-American literature, American literature, and sociology. A collection of 14 essays, the work is Du Bois’s description of the state of the South and African Americans’ lives at the turn of the 20th century. This guide is based on the Amazon Classics Kindle book edition.In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois describes the psychological struggles of African Americans as... Read The Souls of Black Folk Summary

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The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more widely known as Mahatma Gandhi. A key political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement, Gandhi penned this work to narrate his quest for truth and the principles that underpinned his life’s journey. Originally published in 1927, this memoir provides a meticulous account of Gandhi’s spiritual, moral, and political evolution. The literary era in which this was... Read The Story of My Experiments with Truth Summary

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a nonfiction book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian C. Vann Woodward about the origins and nature of segregation in the Southern United States. Originally published in 1955, the commemorative edition was published in 2002. The Strange Career of Jim Crow argues that racial segregation in the rigid and universal form that existed in 1954 did not appear with the end of slavery. In the time between Reconstruction and... Read The Strange Career of Jim Crow Summary

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The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, is a 2018 memoir written by Anthony Ray Hinton (with cowriter Lara Love Hardin)—a man who spent nearly three decades on death row in Alabama.  For his book and for subsequent activism to fight the death penalty at large, public figures from Desmond Tutu to Richard Branson praised Hinton's efforts. Hinton is now a renowned speaker on prison reform, forgiveness, and hope... Read The Sun Does Shine Summary

English writer Graham Greene penned his novella The Third Man to work out the finer details of the plot and setting for the screenplay of Carol Reed’s 1949 film of the same name. (In writing screenplays, Greene preferred to work from source material in story format.) Although publication of the novella wasn’t originally planned, the film was such a huge commercial and critical success that the novella was published in 1950. The film The Third... Read The Third Man Summary

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“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown is written from the perspective of a collective “we.” This group planted colorful perennial flowers, including aster, nasturtium, and delphinium (Line 1); filmed the flowers they planted blooming; then watched this video on fast forward (“Sped the video to see blossoms / brought in seconds,” Lines 11-12). At the end of the poem, the reader discovers that the collective “we” narrating the poem are Black men, and the sped-up video... Read The Tradition Summary

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The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You is a 2019 memoir by novelist Dina Nayeri. It is her first nonfiction book and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. While Nayeri chronicles her childhood escape from post-revolution Iran and her struggle to build an identity, she interweaves modern tales of refugees mired in uncaring asylum systems.SummaryThe author and first-person narrator of... Read The Ungrateful Refugee Summary

Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping ethnography of the Great Migration—the mass exodus of African-Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities dating from approximately 1914-1970. The book traces the history of racism in the Jim Crow South as well as the reasons, successes, and failures of those African-Americans who left the place of their birth in order to seek better economic and social opportunities elsewhere in the... Read The Warmth Of Other Suns Summary

Published in 1934, The Ways of White Folks is Langston Hughes’s collection of 14 short stories focusing on race relations in the United States. With somber tales of struggle and violence, as well as moments of irony and humor, the collection addresses racism, economic disparity, and hope. This study guide quotes and obscures Hughes’s use of the n-word.Plot Summary“Cora Unashamed” tells the story of Cora Jenkins, who works as a maid for a cruel White... Read The Ways of White Folks Summary