November 2020 list by Elizabeth Hanby
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150 Glimpses of the Beatles
by Craig Brown
Author Craig Brown, draws on previously unexamined lore and celebrity testimony in a kaleidoscopic group portrait of the Fab Four that reveals lesser-known examples of their indelible and enduring cultural impact.
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Isabel Wilkerson, identifies the qualifying characteristics of historical caste systems to reveal how a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, enforced by religious views, heritage, and stigma impact everyday American lives.
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Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women
by Kate Manne
Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, Manne shows how privileged men's sense of entitlement to admiration, medical care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power--is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.
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Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History
by Paul Farmer
Farmer, an internationally renowned doctor and anthropologist, offers the first substantive account of this frightening, fast-moving episode and its implications. In vibrant prose, he tells the harrowing stories of Ebola victims while showing why the medical response was slow and insufficient..
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The Iron Sea: How the Allies Hunted and Destroyed Hitler's Warships
by Simon Read
This is the fast-paced story of the Allied bomber crews, brave sailors, and bold commandos who "sunk the Bismarck" and won a hard-fought victory over Hitler's iron sea. Using official war diaries, combat reports, eyewitness accounts and personal letters, Simon Read brings the action and adventure to vivid life.
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The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War
by Jonathan Daniel Wells
The Kidnapping Club was a frighteningly effective network of judges, lawyers, police officers, and bankers who circumvented northern anti-slavery laws by sanctioning the kidnapping of free Black Americans--selling them into markets in the South, South America, and the Caribbean, for vast sums of wealth. "The Kidnapping Club" upends the myth of an abolitionist North at odds with a slavery-loving South.
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The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas
by Robert M. Utley
Utley explores the final years of Sitting Bull’s life of freedom, from 1877 to 1881. To escape American vengeance for his assumed role in the annihilation of Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull led his Hunkpapa following into Canada. They endured hostility, tragedy, heartache, indecision, uncertainty, and starvation and responded with stubborn resistance to the loss of their freedom and way of life.
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The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard
by John Birdsall
A full-length biography inspired by the viral essay, "America, Your Food Is So Gay," recasts the iconic food personality as a closeted gay man who found acceptance and passion through a culturally rich career spent informing America's increasingly sophisticated palate.
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Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis
by Jeffrey H. Jackson
Documents the story of the French activist couple best known by their artistic pseudonyms, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, describing their "paper bullet" anti-Nazi PSYOPS campaign and role in promoting resistance, Jewish culture and LGBTQ awareness.
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We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State
by Kai Strittmatter
The China correspondent for Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung national newspaper draws on in-depth investigative reporting to reveal how the chilling vision of authoritarianism in George Orwell’s 1984 has come true in China’s high-tech surveillance state..
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White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
by Ruby Hamad
Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race, taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep “ownership” of their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace. White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression..
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