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  • Out of the MainstreamBooks and Films You May Have Missed
  • Matt Witt (bio)

Books

A Dream in Polar Fog

By Yuri Rytkheu

Archipelago, 2005

In this touching story, a Canadian sailor is stranded in the northernmost tip of Siberia and gradually becomes part of a native community there. As he learns more about the natives’ relationship with the natural world and their tradition of helping each other survive in the harsh Arctic climate, he begins to question the cultural values and future of his own civilization.

Civil Rights History from the Ground Up

Edited by Emilye Crosby

University of Georgia, 2011

This powerful anthology challenges established myths about the civil rights movement—that it started with an unplanned impulse by Rosa Parks to sit in the front of a bus, that it was the product of Martin Luther King’s vision, that it took place only in the South, and so on. Contributors also examine debates within the movement over sexism, nonviolence, and other issues.

Crossing Zero

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

City Lights, 2011

Journalists who have been covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than twenty years explain the history of American policy toward those countries. Bush’s policies in the region were counterproductive, they argue, and Obama’s are even more so.

Drowning in Oil

By Loren C. Steffy

McGraw-Hill, 2011

A columnist for the Houston Chronicle does an excellent job of both exposing BP’s “reckless pursuit of profit” that preceded the oil disaster off the Gulf Coast and giving voice to some of the oil workers and communities who have been affected.

Failure by Design

By Josh Bivens

Cornell University, 2011

Economic inequality is growing in America as a result of public policy choices influenced by corporate lobbyists. Working people are paying an “inequality tax” as these policies drive down their incomes and savings. [End Page 112]

Fields of Resistance

By Silvia Giagnoni

Haymarket, 2011

A writer provides an engaging personal account of seven months spent in Immokalee, Florida, “tomato capital of the world,” during a campaign to pressure Burger King to increase migrant farmworkers’ pay. Through the stories of people she met, Giagnoni explores the human reality behind issues such as immigration, workers’ rights, corporate accountability, the real cost of our food, and more.

Green Is the New Red

By Will Potter

City Lights, 2011

Since 9/11, corporate interests have intensified a drive to have civil disobedience and other methods of protest labeled “domestic terrorism” under state and federal laws. Much of this coordinated effort has initially been focused on those who have engaged in direct action on environmental and animal abuse issues. The author does not approve of all tactics these activists have used, but he makes a strong case that new restrictions, drastic penalties, and selective prosecution represent a revival of the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Once new precedents are established, he argues, other types of protesters against corporate abuses will be targeted as well.

The Sacred White Turkey

By Frances Washburn

University of Nebraska, 2010

A Lakota medicine woman and her granddaughter find a white turkey on their doorstep on Easter morning. Is it a spiritual sign, or just an unusual bird? So begins this entertaining novel about one native community.

There Is Power in a Union

By Philip Dray

Doubleday, 2011

This 674-page history of industrial unions in the U.S. provides a useful introductory overview by compiling information from many other accounts in one place. Covering nearly two hundred years in one volume, its weakness is that it only skims the surface of many events and barely mentions the rise of public employee unionism, rank-and-file reform movements in a number of major unions, and many other key topics.

When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home

By Paula J. Caplan

MIT Press, 2011

When veterans who make it home from Afghanistan or Iraq have psychological issues, the standard response is to prescribe therapy and psychiatric drugs. A Harvard-based psychologist argues that in many cases what they are experiencing is a healthy reaction to an inhumane...

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