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The Post-Trump Big Questions Canon

Top 10 The Post-Trump Big Questions Canon : The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The Handmaid's Tale, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Silent Spring, A People's History of the United States, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, It Can't Happen Here, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
AuthorMichelle Alexander
ISBN1595581030
"Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot...
The Handmaid's Tale
AuthorMargaret Atwood
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
AuthorJane Mayer
Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax...
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
AuthorBarbara Ehrenreich
ISBN0805063897
Reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity--a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival.

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join...
Silent Spring
AuthorRachel Carson
ISBN0618249060
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in three serialized excerpts in the New Yorker in June of 1962. The book appeared in September of that year and the outcry that followed its publication forced the banning of DDT and spurred revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land,...
A People's History of the United States
AuthorHoward Zinn
ISBN0060838655
Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A People's History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s...
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
AuthorMatthew Desmond
ISBN0553447432
In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century...
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
AuthorIsabel Wilkerson
ISBN0679444327
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. 

From...
It Can't Happen Here
AuthorSinclair Lewis
The only one of Sinclair Lewis's later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression when...
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
AuthorArlie Russell Hochschild
ISBN1620972255
In Strangers in Their Own Land, the renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarks on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. As she gets to know people who strongly oppose...
The Fire Next Time
AuthorJames Baldwin
A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice,...
The Jungle
AuthorUpton Sinclair
ISBN1884365302
For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown.

When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial...
The Underground Railroad
AuthorColson Whitehead
ISBN0385542364
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad,...
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
AuthorJonathan Kozol
ISBN0060974990
Two cases of mothers lying about where they reside in order to get their young children into better school districts have made news recently. In Ohio in January, Kelley Williams-Bolar was sentenced to 10 days in county jail and three years probation for enrolling her children in the Copley-Fairlawn...
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
AuthorMalcolm X
Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688

Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister....
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
AuthorWilliam L. Shirer
ISBN0671728687
Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third...
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
AuthorTimothy Snyder
ISBN0804190119
A historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism.

On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible: the election of Donald Trump as president. Against all predictions, one of the most-disliked presidential candidates...
The Souls of Black Folk
AuthorW.E.B. Du Bois
This landmark book is a founding work in the literature of black protest. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) played a key role in developing the strategy and program that dominated early 20th-century black protest in America. In this collection of essays, first published together in 1903, he eloquently...
How to Be a Woman
AuthorCaitlin Moran
ISBN0091940737
Though they have the vote and the Pill and haven't been burned as witches since 1727, life isn't exactly a stroll down the catwalk for modern women. They are beset by uncertainties and questions: Why are they supposed to get Brazilians? Why do bras hurt? Why the incessant talk about babies? And do men secretly...
Men Explain Things to Me
AuthorRebecca Solnit
ISBN1608463869
In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works,...
Orientalism
AuthorEdward W. Said
More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic.

In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism"...
Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond
AuthorMarc Lamont Hill
ISBN1501124978
Named a Best Book of 2016 by Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
Nautilus Award Winner

“A worthy and necessary addition to the contemporary canon of civil rights literature.” —New York Times

In this “thought-provoking and important” (Library...
The Origins of Totalitarianism
AuthorHannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an essential component of any study of twentieth-century political history

The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European...
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America
AuthorColin Woodard
ISBN0670022969
An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another...
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
AuthorNaomi Klein
ISBN0805079831
In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed...
Letter from the Birmingham Jail
AuthorMartin Luther King Jr.
ISBN0062509551
Martin Luther King, Jr. rarely had time to answer his critics. But on April 16, 1963, he was confined to the Birmingham jail, serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations. "Alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell," King pondered a letter that fellow clergymen...
Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
AuthorArt Spiegelman
ISBN0679729771
Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spieglman's Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegleman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself....
Nobody Knows My Name
AuthorJames Baldwin
ISBN0679744738
An interesting transition between the raw passion of Notes of a Native Son and the prophetic rhetoric of The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name is as eloquent as either work. The essays collected here range from an analysis of the ties between racial and national identity in America through a memoir...
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
AuthorGeorge Packer
ISBN1466836954
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation

American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending...
Social Darwinism in American Thought
AuthorRichard Hofstadter
ISBN0807055034
Social Darwinism in American Thought portrays the overall influence of Darwin on American social theory & the notable battle waged among thinkers over the implications of evolutionary theory for social thought & political action. Theorists such as Herbert Spencer & Wm Graham Sumner...
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
AuthorJill Leovy
ISBN0385529988
On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man was shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of hundreds of young men slain in LA every year. His assailant ran down the street, jumped into an SUV, and vanished, hoping to join the vast majority of killers in American cities who...
V for Vendetta
AuthorAlan Moore
ISBN1401207928
"Remember, remember the fifth of November..."

A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David...
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
AuthorTheodore Dalrymple
ISBN1566635055
Here is a searing account-probably the best yet published-of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does. Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is...
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Authorbell hooks
White male scholars who examined the black family by attempting to see in what ways it resembled the white family structure were confident that their data was not biased by their own personal prejudices against women assuming an active role in family decision-making. But it must be remembered that...
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (PB)
AuthorPatricia Hill Collins
In this book, Patricia Hill Collins explores the question of why racism has persisted in the United States despite the elimination of legal discrimination. Specifically, she focuses on how popular culture and media replicate, resist, and reproduce old and new forms of discrimination through their...
Women, Race, and Class
AuthorAngela Y. Davis
ISBN0394713516
Incisive and concise, Women, Race, and Class charts the history of racial and gender oppression in America. In lucid prose Angela Davis breaks down how misogyny, racism, and classism have shaped the character of the nation’s social life from the Antebellum Era to the Sixties. She pays special attention...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
AuthorJared Diamond
ISBN0739467352
"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of...
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
AuthorEli Clare
ISBN0896086054
“Eli Clare works a vital alchemy. . . . Using the language of the elemental world, he delineates a complex human intersection and transmutes cruelty into its opposite—a potent, lifegiving remedy.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

First published in 1999, Exile & Pride established...
Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
AuthorChristopher L. Hayes
ISBN0307720454
A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another –  from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate...
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
AuthorCorey Robin
ISBN0199793743
Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's...
Every Man Dies Alone
AuthorHans Fallada
ISBN1933633638
Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is the gripping tale of an ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule. This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. Berlin,...
Common Sense
AuthorThomas Paine
ISBN0143036254
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them.

Published...
The Sociopath Next Door
AuthorMartha Stout
ISBN0767915828
Who is the devil you know?

Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?

In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will...
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
AuthorAndrea Lee Smith
ISBN0896087433
A recognized Native American scholar and co-founder of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the largest grassroots, multiracial feminist organization in the country, Andrea Smith (Cherokee) is an emerging leader in progressive political circles. In Conquest, Smith places Native American...
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