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History and Current Events
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Current Events and Recent Releases |
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| Start by Believing: Larry Nassar's Crimes, the Institutions that Enabled Him, and the Brave... by John Barr and Dan MurphyWhat it is: a disturbing, well-researched exposé of Michigan State University sports doctor Larry Nassar's sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and girls, many of them competitive gymnasts.
Author alert: Journalists John Barr and Dan Murphy won the Peabody Award in 2019 for their reportage of Nassar's crimes.
Reviewers say: "the definitive history of the case" (Library Journal). |
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Impeachment : An American history
by John Meacham, Jeffrey A Engel, Peter Baker, Timothy Naftali
What it is: Four experts on the American presidency review the only three impeachment cases from history—against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton—and explore its power and meaning for today.
Author Alert: Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians.
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| 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz by Heather Dune MacadamWhat it's about: In 1942, the Slovakian government paid the Nazis approximately $200 per person to deport hundreds of Jewish women to Auschwitz. Told they were being recruited for factory work, the women were among the first of the concentration camp's 1.3 million prisoners.
Why you should read it: Written to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, this heartwrenching history collects interviews with survivors, family members, and witnesses, as well as testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. |
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A Warning
by Anonymous
What it's about: The same anonymous official who revealed the operations of Trump officials trying to thwart the president's worst impulses chronicles Trump's dangerous incompetence, character flaws, abuses of power, and disregard for the truth
What's inside: An anonymous author who identifies as a senior official in the Trump administration warns readers about events unfolding during the Trump Presidency. A must read before Election Day.
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| Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene A. CarruthersWhat it is: a galvanizing call for black liberation, written by Black Youth Project 100 founding director Charlene A. Carruthers.
What's inside: strategies on how to address the movement's goals through an intersectional lens, pulled from the author's experiences as a community organizer and a self-described "Black lesbian leftist."
Don't miss: Carruthers' enlightening discussion of the "Chicago Model" of community action, which dates back to the 1930s. |
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| A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's... by Rachel DevlinWhat it is: an informative account of the women and girls who fought for school desegregation between the 1940s and 1960s.
Did you know? In many of the era's desegregation cases, including 1954's Brown v. Board of Education, female plaintiffs vastly outnumbered male plaintiffs.
Try this next: Janet Dewart Bell's inspiring oral history Lighting the Fires of Freedom collects interviews with black women who were involved in the civil rights movement. |
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| Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval by Saidiya HartmanWhat it's about: Fleeing the post-Civil War South in the early 20th century, black women sought freedom in northern urban enclaves and eschewed social conventions to create new lives for themselves.
Is it for you? Guggenheim Fellow Saidiya Hartman's meticulously researched chronicle occasionally dips into speculation when the historical record isn't sufficient.
Reviewers say: "This passionate, poetic retrieval of women from the footnotes of history is a superb literary achievement" (Publishers Weekly). |
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| The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya MilesWhat it’s about: Detroit, Michigan’s enslavement of African and Indigenous people throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Why you might like it: Tiya Miles’ scholarly yet accessible history illuminates the complicity of Northern states in the slave trade.
Book buzz: This thought-provoking work from MacArthur Fellow Miles was the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize winner and a Harriet Tubman Prize finalist. |
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| The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the Story of a Forgotten Era by Elizabeth Dowling TaylorWhat it is: a sweeping history of black society in Washington, D.C. that fought for reforms during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.
Featuring: Library of Congress librarian and activist Daniel Murray, who served on President McKinley’s inauguration committee and founded the National Afro-American Council, a forerunner of the NAACP.
Read it for: profiles of influential black tastemakers who rarely make the history books. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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