Social justice book reviews
Today, Frances of Volatile Rune kicked off Week 2 of Nonfiction November! Here’s her prompt, Choosing Nonfiction:
Read moreWhat are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking.
You know Nonfiction November is going to be packed when it gets started before November does! The other hosts and I have so much planned for you all that we just couldn’t wait. As I said last week, I truly do love this event. It’s hard to find folks in the book blogging community who want to talk nonfiction, but in November, that all changes. It’s nonfiction’s moment and she is ready for it.
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Fall is here, which means it’s almost time for Nonfiction November 2023!
Reading and blogging challenges are a huge part of book blog culture, but since I am an exclusively nonfiction book blogger, Nonfiction November is the one I wait for all year. And next week, it’s finally back!
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It is not uncommon in school to learn about women’s suffrage. Most of us are familiar with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton because of it. As far as feminist history, this is often the beginning and the end of the story. If we want to know about the lives of women under slavery, the role that Black men and women played in achieving women’s suffrage, the treatment of working-class women by suffragists, and the stances that Black women took on the abortion and anti-rape movements, then we have to look elsewhere. Angela Davis’s 1981 masterpiece Women, Race & Class is where you can find all this and more. High school and college classrooms around the country would do well to add it to their syllabi.
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Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice is Justice for All is the first book I’ve read that is solely dedicated to the trans issue. Only… trans people are not an issue at all. They are millions of people fighting to survive. Faye’s pointed and ironic title is the first way that she flips the mainstream treatment of trans people on its head.
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Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell was my first step in my own journey toward abolitionism. I started reading it days after the footage of Tyre Nichols’ murder became public. I’ve known since 2020—embarrassingly late—that policing was a racist institution, and since then I’ve hovered around the “defund the police” area. I didn’t take a hard stance because I didn’t know enough about abolition. But Nichols’ murder, in which five Black cops with body cams used their hands to murder someone, pushed me over the edge. Reform and defunding don’t work. We need abolition.
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I read a lot of books… or at least I try to. I also start a lot of books that I never end up finishing for a variety of reasons. I’ve decided to share them with you for the first time ever. Here is six years’ worth of books that landed in my DNF pile!
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A wise woman once said, “[November] is short but also, like, terribly and insufferably long at the same time.”
Nonfiction November started on Halloween, which I believe was about 25 years ago. Now, Thanksgiving is already over and it’s Christmas! And it’s still Nonfiction November!
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The time for me to host my first ever Nonfiction November prompt is finally here!
This week, I’m asking you to share the book or books that have changed the way you see the world.
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Christian Nationalism, or the malicious use of Christianity as a weapon to strip people of their liberty, is a poison to American democracy. Alarmingly, more than one in three Americans have never even heard of Christian Nationalism. This frequently-updated list of Christian Nationalism books by a full-time advocate for church-state separation will help you and your community understand the crucial facts surrounding this issue. Only when we all fight this insidious system together can we achieve true religious freedom.
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