Recommended reading. Here's a list of books, articles, videos that our community finds informative, inspirational, enlightening, or nurturing. Please feel free to suggest materials that other activist might find useful.
Articles
How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. -The Atlantic. Click here for link.
Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War -The NewYorker. Click here for link.
Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump's Disaster Capitalism and other articles -Naomi Klein. Click here for link.
Since This Changes Everything was published, Klein’s primary focus has been on putting its ideas into action. She is one of the organizers and authors of Canada's Leap Manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels. The Leap has been endorsed by over 200 organizations, tens of thousands of individuals, and has inspired similar climate justice initiatives around the world. In November 2016 she was awarded Australia’s prestigious Sydney Peace Prize, for, according to the prize jury, “exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice.” Klein is a member of the board of directors for climate-action group 350.org. In 2015, she was invited to speak at the Vatican to help launch Pope Francis’s historic encyclical on ecology, Laudato si’. In 2017, Klein became Senior Correspondent for The Intercept. She is also a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and contributor to the Nation Magazine. Recent articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and Le Monde.
Ten Points for Democracy Advocates and other articles -George Layoff. Click here for link. George Lakoff has retired as Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is now Director of the Center for the Neural Mind & Society (cnms.berkeley.edu).
7 Signs of Tyranny and other articles and videos -Robert Reich. Click here for link. Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR ALL.
Books
Don't Think of an Elephant! -George Layoff. Click here for link.
This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine -Naomi Klein. Click here for link.
The End of Nature, Oil and Honey and other books and articles -Bill McKibben. Click here for link. The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change. Bill McKibben is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country save North Korea, spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone Pipeline, and launched the fast-growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
Building the New American Economy, Smart Fair and Sustainable, by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Click here for link.
The Hour of Land, a Personal Typography of America's National Parks, by Terry Tempest Williams. Click here for link. This timely book was released just as those who wish to privatize and dismantle protection of our federal lands gained control of all branches of our government. "For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them." ~from the author's website.
White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg. Click here for link.
"Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well." ~from the author's website.
Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance. Click here for author's website.
To understand the rage and disaffection of America’s working-class whites, look to Greater Appalachia. In HILLBILLY ELEGY, J.D. Vance confronts us with the economic and spiritual travails of this forgotten corner of our country. Here we find women and men who dearly love their country, yet who feel powerless as their way of life is devastated. Never before have I read a memoir so powerful, and so necessary. (Reihan Salam, executive editor, National Review)
Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi.
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries Arturo Whitman, a local widower, and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African-Americans passing for white. And even as Boy, Snow, and Bird are divided, their estrangement is complicated by an insistent curiosity about one another. In seeking an understanding that is separate from the image each presents to the world, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold.
The Burgess Boys, by Elizabeth Strout. Click here for author's website.
Brothers Jim and Bob Burgess, and sister Susan, are mired in a childhood trauma: when he was four, Bob unwittingly released the parking brake on the family car, which ran over their father and killed him. Originally from small Shirley Falls, Maine, the Burgess brothers have long since fled to vastly disparate lives as New York City attorneys. Egoistic Jim is a famous big shot with a corporate firm. Self-effacing Bob leads a more low-profile career with Legal Aid. High-strung Susan calls them home to fix a family crisis: her son stands accused of a possible hate crime against the small town’s improbable Somali population. The siblings’ varying responses to the crisis illuminate their sheer differences while also recalling their shared upbringing, forcing them finally to deal with their generally unmentioned, murky family history. --Julie Trevelyan
Americanah, We should All Be Feminists, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, and other books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Click here for Goodreads link.
On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder. Click here for author's website.
“The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”
Resources
Black Lives Matter reading list. Click here for link.
America's Founding Documents: The Bill of Rights. They're ours, they're indivisible, we should know them. The Constitution, supreme law of the land. The Declaration of Independence, the principles on which our government, and our identity as Americans, are based. Click here for a link to National Archives to read all three.
The Wilderness Society's Activism Toolkit Click here for link.
Indivisible, the practical guide for resisting the Trump agenda. Click here for link.