Well, here we are on the far side of Inauguration Day. battered by devastating executive orders, beset by billionaire bros, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, lawless pardonees, and assorted oligarchs lording over us without fear of being challenged.
Or so they think. We’re fighting back, and my RESIST! promotion at The Literate Lizard is now live. Lots of books to help us fight back and get a good grounding in the politics and history we need to do so. Thee coupon code RESIST in checkout will take 20% off the books listed in the five booklists of the promo, dozens of books in all, and I’ll add more as they are published.
One of those booklists is for kids, and I thought it would be a good time for a sampling of the wide variety of political and cultural books available to the younger set. I’m focusing here on young picture book readers and middle school readers.
DK Publishing has been cranking out a lot of titles in their new series aimed at five to nine year olds. These 64-page books tackle a little bit of everything, from politics to life challenges like adoption and divorce to dealing with emotions to sparking your creativity.
The A Kids Book About titles are best used when read together. Helping to kickstart important, challenging, and empowering conversations for kids and their grown-ups through beautiful and thought-provoking pages. The series supports an incredible and diverse group of authors, who are either experts in their field, or have first-hand experience on the topic.
A Kids Co. is a new kind of media company enabling kids to explore big topics in a new and engaging way, with a growing series of books, podcasts, and blogs made to empower. Learn more about us online by searching for A Kids Co.
Some of the titles are featured in my promotion, such as A Kids Book About Banned Books, by the
National Coalition Against Censorship, A Kids Book About Systemic Racism, by documentary filmmaker Jordan Thierry, and A Kids Book About Being Inclusive, by teenagers Ashton Mota and Rebekah Bruesehoff, who are part of the GenderCool storytelling project. Other titles deal with Climate Change, Feminism, Hope, Perseverance, and so much more. March and April will bring even more titles.
DK has also started a series aimed at even younger children, 24-page board books for toddlers up to age three. Examples include A Little Book About Activism, by Courtney Ahn, A Little Book About Trust, by Michael Wieder and Greg Davidson, and the forthcoming A Little Book About Bias, by Courtney Ahn. They also have a first conversations series aimed at toddler, with titles like We Care: A First Conversation About Justice, by Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and Sharee Miller. It’s publisher blurb says “based on the research that race, gender, justice, and other important topics should be discussed with toddlers on up, this read-aloud series offers adults the opportunity to begin important conversations with young children in an informed, safe, and supported way.”
Some examples of books for middle school readers include We Shall Not Be Denied: A Timeline of Voting Rights and Suppression in America, by Cayla Bellanger Degroat and Cicely Lewis, and Evicted!: The Struggle for the Right to Vote, by Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Charly Palmer. Famed political author Naomi Klein has adapted her writing for the 9-12 set with How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other. Many other adult titles have been adapted for children. Examples include Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy: Racism, Injustice, and How You Can Be a Changemaker, by Emmanuel Acho, and Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, an adaptation of Kendi’s adult book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which was also turned into a teen title by Reynolds and Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning.
There are lots of a interesting picture books out there. How about Just Help!: How to Build a Better World, by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and illustrated by Angela Dominguez; The ABCs of Queer History, by Seema Yasmin and Lucy Kirk (“all the joys and challenges of queer history in the United States through lively, rhyming verse and bright, colorful illustrations”); Fighting for YES!: The Story of Disability Rights Activist Judith Heumann, by Maryann Cocca-Leffler and Vivien Mildenberger; Make Your Mark: The Empowering True Story of the First Known Black Female Tattoo Artist, by Jacci Gresham and Sherry Fellores, illustrated by David Wilkerson; and Girls on the Rise, by poet Amanda Gorman, illustrated by Loveis Wise.
And don’t forget a book about fact-checking and misinformation: Killer Underwear Invasion!: How to Spot Fake News, Disinformation & Conspiracy Theories, by Elise Gravel.
Truly, this is just a tiny taste of the amazing number of books out there. So you know what to do: buy these books for the children of local MAGA types you know, then and watch the parent’s heads explode as their children’s minds expand!
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE NEW NONFICTION
- Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkinss Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany, by Rebecca Brenner Graham. She was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, the longest-serving Labor Secretary, and an architect of the New Deal. Yet beyond these celebrated accomplishments there is another dimension to Frances Perkins’s story. Without fanfare, and despite powerful opposition, Perkins helped save the lives of countless Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.
“Immigration problems usually have to be decided in a few days. They involve human lives. There can be no delaying,” Perkins wrote in her memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew. In March 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins was appointed Secretary of Labor by FDR. As Hitler rose to power, thousands of German-Jewish refugees and their loved ones reached out to the INS—then part of the Department of Labor—applying for immigration to the United States, writing letters that began “Dear Miss Perkins . . .” “Finally, proper attention is being paid to Frances Perkins and her dogged efforts to aid European Jews during the Holocaust. Rebecca Brenner Graham’s expansive and modern telling reminds us that there are historical figures to whom we can—and should—look for inspiration as we continue to face some of the same xenophobic, racist, antisemitic dynamics as Perkins did in the 1930s. You’ll emerge from this book with a new hero.” —Rebecca Erbelding, PhD, Holocaust historian and author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning Rescue Board
- Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy, by Jeffrey Boutwell.
During his seven-decade career in public life, George Sewall Boutwell sought to "redeem America's promise" of racial equality, economic equity, and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, assist President Lincoln in funding the Union war effort, facilitate Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, impeach President Andrew Johnson, and frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington. The son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, George Boutwell would do battle during his career with American political royalty, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt.
The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history. “George Boutwell, one of the central political characters of his age, whose story charts the whole arc of the party of Lincoln, is at last brought vividly and brilliantly back to life—with vital lessons for our time about what it takes to defend democracy.” — Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln
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Gambling Man: The Secret Story of the World's Greatest Disruptor, Masayoshi Son, by Lionel Barber. I feel like the last thing I’d want to read right now is a biography of a billionaire bro, but here it is. As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few standout investors. And amidst the BlackRocks, Vanguards, and Berkshire Hathaways stands arguably the most iconoclastic of them all: SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
In Gambling Man, the first Western biography of Son, we go behind the scenes of the world’s most monied halls of power in New York, Tokyo, Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia, and beyond to see how Son’s firm SoftBank has defied conventional wisdom and imposing odds to push global tech and commerce into the future.
From the dizzying highs of Uber, DoorDash, and Slack to the epic lows of WeWork and tech-infused dogwalking app Wag Son and SoftBank have been at the center of cutting-edge capitalism’s absolute peaks and valleys. In the process, Son, son of a pachinko kingpin who grew up in a slum in Japan, has been a hero, a villain, and even a meme-ified hero to the internet tech- and finance-bro set all at once.
- Slavery After Slavery: Revealing the Legacy of Forced Child Apprenticeships on Black Families, from Emancipation to the Present, by Mary Frances Berry. While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, white southerners established a system of apprenticeship after the Civil War that entrapped Black children and their families, leading to undue hardships for generations to come. In Slavery After Slavery, historian Mary Frances Berry traces the stories behind individual cases from southern supreme courts to demonstrate how formerly enslaved families and their descendants were systemically injured through white supremacist practices, perpetuated by the legal system. “Basing her work on ten compelling court cases, Mary Frances Berry brings to life a horrific chapter of post–Civil War history that has been woefully overlooked: the virtual re-enslavement of Black children as forced laborers to enrich white adults through court-ordered apprenticeships. Slavery After Slavery is essential reading to understand—and contest—the racist structures that survived Emancipation and continue to deny Black people equal status and family autonomy in America today.” —Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and Torn Apart
- Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation, by Bennett Parten. A groundbreaking account of Sherman’s March to the Sea—the critical Civil War campaign that destroyed the Confederacy—told for the first time from the perspective of the tens of thousands of enslaved people who fled to the Union lines and transformed Sherman’s march into the biggest liberation event in American history. By the time the army seized Savannah in December, as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman’s army. They endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day—often without food or shelter from the winter weather—and at times Union commanders discouraged and even prevented the self-emancipated from staying with the army. Racism was not confined to the Confederacy. "In compelling prose, Parten dramatizes how Sherman's March catalyzed the Civil War's social revolution, as Southern Blacks fought 'their own version of the war' in the name of powerful visions of freedom. Rarely does a history book so completely and persuasively recast an iconic event. A must-read for all those who seek to understand the Civil War's meaning and legacy." —Elizabeth R. Varon, author of Longstreet
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No Human Involved: The Serial Murder of Black Women and Girls and the Deadly Cost of Police Indifference, by Cheryl L. Neely. When Black women and girls are targeted and murdered their cases are often categorized by police officers as “N.H.I.” – “No Humans Involved.” Dehumanized and invisible to the public eye, they are rarely seen as victims. In the United States, Black women are killed at a higher rate than any other group of women, but their victimhood is not covered by the media and their cases do not receive an adequate level of urgency.
Utilizing intensive historical research of cases in cities such as Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angles, Cheryl Neely calls attention to serial cases of Black female murder victims and a lack of police action. Neely approaches each case and story with detailed care. Instead of focusing solely on the killings and the murderers, she highlights the lives of the women and girls and their communities that never stopped fighting for justice. “Cheryl Neely’s book is an eardrum-shattering clarion call for America to reckon with the humanity of missing Black women and girls. The infuriating negligence of the authorities is laid bare and incontrovertible, yet between horror and grief are heartfelt memories of the lives of women and girls taken too soon.” —Kali Gross, author of Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times
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Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, by Tao Leigh Goffe. In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands’ bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands’ sacred ecologies. Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis. “Dark Laboratory is an urgent exploration of race, climate, and the devastating colonial experimentation with human lives and the natural world. It explodes conventional thinking about the crushing effects of profit-mongering, then unexpectedly, leads us back to sources of original power and ways of knowing who we are. Tao Leigh Goffe is a courageous, big-picture thinker who leaves no leaf unturned.” —Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
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Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union, by Richard Carwardine. The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism.
How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where antislavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future.
At the center of this melee stood Abraham Lincoln, who would turn to his own faith for guidance, proclaiming more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since. These pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war. “How did a people that, as Lincoln put it, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God come to slaughter each other so? With his singular subtlety backed with a lifetime of learning, Richard Carwardine explains by embedding slavery, antislavery, and nationalism in the history of American Protestantism as never before." —Sean Wilentz, author of No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding
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Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood. Not sure I want to read about a lawless republic in decline either, but here it is. In its final decades, the Roman Republic was engulfed by a crime wave. An epidemic of extortions, murders, and acts of insurrection tested the court system’s capacity to maintain order. As case after case filled the docket, an ambitious young lawyer named Cicero seized every opportunity to litigate, forging a reputation as a master debater with a bright future in politics. In Lawless Republic, historian Josiah Osgood recounts the legendary orator’s ascent and fall, and his pivotal role in the republic’s lurch toward autocracy.
Cicero’s first appearance in the courts came shortly after the end of a brutal civil war. After leveraging his fame as a lawyer to become a consul, he ruthlessly crushed a coup by suppressing the liberties of Roman citizens. The premiere legal mind of Rome came to argue that the pursuit of a higher justice could sometimes justify sweeping the law aside, laying the groundwork for Roman history’s most famous act of political violence—the assassination of Julius Caesar.
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The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, by Kristen Martin. The orphan story has been mythologized: Step one: While a child is still too young to form distinct memories of them, their parents die in an untimely fashion. Step two: Orphan acquires caretakers who amplify the world’s cruelty. Step three: Orphan escapes and goes on an adventure, encountering the world’s vast possibilities.
The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow upends this. Pairing powerful critiques of popular orphan narratives, from Annie to the Boxcar Children to Party of Five, journalist Kristen Martin explores the real history of orphanhood in the United States, from the 1800s to the present. Martin reveals the mission of religious indoctrination that was at the core of the first orphanages, the orphan trains that took parentless children out West (often without a choice), and the inherent classism and racism that still underlies the United States' approach to child welfare. “A deeply compassionate, rigorously researched, and passionately argued exploration of the gap between the myths and realities of American orphanhood. This searing history left me outraged, enlightened, and full of deepened conviction that we need to keep peeling away our collective American mythologies in order to reckon with our hardest truths.” —Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
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How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert. When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.
Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.
Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty: her colorful childhood in the restaurant business, the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef, and that life-altering visit to Poland. “I started crying on page one; a few pages later I burst into laughter. This beautifully written book takes readers on an emotional journey that is both heartbreaking and hopeful.”—Ruth Reichl
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Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause, by Naomi Watts. At thirty-six, Naomi Watts had just completed filming King Kong and was trying to start a family when she was told that she was on the brink of menopause. It is estimated that seventy-five million women in the United States are currently dealing with menopause symptoms (dry itchy skin, raging hormones, night sweats), and yet the very word “menopause” continues to be associated with stigma and confusion. With so little information, many women feel unprepared, ashamed, and deeply alone when the time comes. This is the book Naomi Watts wishes she had when she first started experiencing symptoms. “With humor, vulnerability, and wisdom, Dare I Say It turns the often taboo topic of menopause into a conversation that is not only necessary but long overdue. This book will resonate with women everywhere seeking guidance, solidarity, and the reassurance that they are not alone in their journey.”—Dr. Lisa Mosconi, New York Times bestselling author of The Menopause Brain
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I Dream of Joni: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots, by Henry Alford. Joni Mitchell’s life, psyche, and evolving legacy are explored here in vivid technicolor—from her childhood in Saskatoon, Canada, to her arrival in Laurel Canyon that turned her into, as Alford puts it, “the bard of heartbreak and longing.” Each period of Mitchell’s life is observed via the artists, friends, family, and lovers she encountered along the way, including James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Georgia O’Keefe, Prince, and, most significantly, Kilauren, the daughter Mitchell gave up for adoption at birth but then reconnected with decades later.
Presented in the impressionistic vein of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret, I Dream of Joni explores in fifty-three essays, with the author’s trademark wit and verve, the life of the legendary singer-songwriter. “Alford, long a favorite of mine, captures the artist in all her zesty contradictions. He doesn't seek to resolve them, to draft some overarching theory of Joni, but rather to simply — as he puts it — 'spill them out on a tabletop and watch them sparkle.' That they do." –Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Stiff and Fuzz
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Three Wild Dogs (and the truth): A Memoir, by Markus Zusak. In this poignant, funny, and disarmingly honest memoir, one of the world’s most beloved storytellers, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book Thief, tells of his family’s adoption of three troublesome rescue dogs—a charming and courageous love story about making even the most incorrigible of animals family. "Zusak’s garrulous style gives appropriate spotlight to his furry subjects (a few cats are involved too), celebrating their indomitable spirits in a convivial, all-but-exasperated tone. [His] innate humor jostles readers throughout, creating a wholly different page-turning experience from the epic nature of his fiction. Dog lovers will surely find a lot to chew on here as Zusak mines for the truth the title intimates that those touched by a dog will all agree: we are changed for having known them." — Booklist
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them, but If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be truly appreciated. I would love to be considered ‘The Official Bookstore of Daily Kos.’ Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 20% each week). I’m busily adding new content every day, and will have lots more dedicated subject pages and curated booklists as it grows. I want it to be full of book-lined rabbit holes to lose yourself in (and maybe throw some of those books into a shopping cart as well.)
We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. Note that the DAILYKOS coupon code is only for the bookstore, not for the audiobook affiliate.
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