White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo and Michael Eric Dyson

 

 

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.

In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to ‘bad people’ (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

 

 

This "heart-thumping backwoods adventure" (New York Times Book Review) from bestselling author Michael Koryta will soon be a major motion picture starring Angelina Jolie and Nicholas Hoult. 

When fourteen-year-old Jace Wilson witnesses a brutal murder, he's plunged into a new life, issued a false identity and hidden in a wilderness skills program for troubled teens. The plan is to get Jace off the grid while police find the two killers.

The result is the start of a nightmare. The killers, known as the Blackwell Brothers, are slaughtering anyone who gets in their way in a methodical quest to reach him. Now all that remains between them and the boy are Ethan and Allison Serbin, who run the wilderness survival program; Hannah Faber, who occupies a lonely fire lookout tower; and endless miles of desolate Montana mountains. The clock is ticking, the mountains are burning, and those who wish Jace Wilson dead are no longer far behind.

 

The Young Hemingway by Michael Reynolds

 

 

A National Book Award Finalist

"The Young Hemingway will entertain and surprise…It should rank as one of the best nonfiction books of the year." ―Los Angeles Times

Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway through World War I, where he was frustrated by being too far away from the action and glory, despite his being wounded and nursed to health by Agnes Von Kurowsky―the older woman with whom he fell terribly in love.

 

Amendment Seventeen: A Blessing? Or a Curse? 2nd ed. Edition by Michael James Geanoulis Sr

 

 

Our thoroughly educated and distinguished founding fathers spent more time on the careful construction of our Senate than on any other topic. They wanted it to be populated with the highest and best humanity had to offer. So, they concluded, by a vote of 10 to 0, that such a Senate could best be achieved by assigning State legislatures the chore of selecting them; not the public at large who were already given the House of Representatives.

They would no doubt be biased in this regard, but if the founders could be resurrected long enough to survey how we managed the well-considered legacy they gave us in 1787, and how Amendment Seventeen (A17) impacted that legacy, they would be horrified. "What were you thinking?" they would likely ask as they discovered our slowly deteriorating condition, "We intended for you to have a republic, not the popular democratic spectacle of turbulence and contention demonstrated by the ancient record."

Now that we've had more than a hundred years of experience with (A17) and its revised, 1913 formula for popular Senate elections, we should be able to parse the available evidence on the before and after 1913, were we interested enough to do so, in order to determine whether or not A17 was a net good thing for us, or a bad thing; whether or not it was a Blessing for the United States, or a Curse.