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In this book, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner,...
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"Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being...
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Pub. Date
2019.
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The nine interconnected characters proudly describe themselves and their backgrounds, involving topics that range from a physical disability to language brokering, offering an opportunity to take pride in a personal story and connect to collective struggle for justice.
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A chronicle based on four years of reporting follows five teenage girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard--Washington County, Maine.
Washington County, Maine. Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie are teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region. For four years Georges followed their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times:...
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Kathryn's Middle School Summer Reading Picks 2021
Non-Fiction
Social Justice & Activism
Kathryn's Middle School Summer Reading Picks 2021
Non-Fiction
Social Justice & Activism
Formats
Description
"Learn about identities, true histories, and anti-racism work ... This book is written so young people will feel empowered to stand up to the adults in their lives. This book will give them the language and ability to understand racism and a drive to undo it"-- Cover
This book is written for the young person who doesn't know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life. For the 14 year old who sees injustice at school and isn't able to understand...
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"Between 1970 and 1974 ten million Americans abandoned the city, and the commercialism, and all the inauthentic bourgeois comforts of the Eisenhower-era America of their parents. Instead, they went back to the land. It was the only time in modern history that urbanization has gone into reverse. Kate Daloz follows the dreams and ideals of a small group of back-to-the-landers to tell the story of a nationwide movement and moment. And she shows how...
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"Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you...
8) The namesake
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A large-print edition of Lahiri's novel, which chronicles the adolescent to mid-life identity struggles of Gogol Ganguli, a child of Indian immigrants, whose father, an engineer, adapted well to life in the U.S. and whose mother did not.
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Pub. Date
2021.
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"A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of 'the state,' political violence, and social inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike -- either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we...
10) Bunny
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"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...
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What should we have for dinner? When you can eat just about anything nature (or the supermarket) has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the foods might shorten your life. Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from a national eating disorder. As the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous...
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Cancer researchers, Ireland's battlefields, and civil rights leaders help Gladwell demonstrate the hidden truths behind the weak and the powerful. Gladwell also heads into the classroom to examine common misconceptions about how we define advantages and disadvantages.
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"In this powerful work of narrative nonfiction, Desmond documents the months he spent living alongside tenants and landlords in Milwaukee, exploring the issues of poverty and homelessness in a segregated city. Taking readers on a journey into the daily lives of families facing eviction, sometimes repeatedly, the author creates a compelling and heartbreaking work that leaves readers wondering how we got here and what we can do to help."--
"In Evicted,...
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Ideas, products, messages and behaviors "spread just like viruses do." Behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes.
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"In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States.
The New York Times Magazine’s...
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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 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
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Black History & Activism: Recommended Reading for MLK Day
Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
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Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
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Description
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories...
18) Dreamers
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"An illustrated picture book in which award-winning author Yuyi Morales tells her own immigration story"--
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his fatherb7sa figure he knows more as a myth than as a manb7shas been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odysseyb7sfirst to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration...
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"When Layla Saad began an Instagram challenge called #meandwhitesupremacy, she never predicted it would become a cultural movement. She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it... Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 80,000 people downloaded the supporting work Me and White Supremacy. Updated and expanded from the original edition, Me and White Supremacy...
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