Vote for the

2020 - 2021 Read!

Voting has closed for the 2020 - 2021 Community Read, thank you to all who voted!

By N.K. Jemisin (2015, Fiction, 470 pp.)

"Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries."

By Willie Artis (2019, Memoir, 260 pp.)

"From a very young age, Artis learned the value of money and relationships, navigating through perilous circumstances in a segregated South. Artis worked several jobs from the ground up and excelled in each one. In the midst of his advancement, he was fortunate enough to live through one of America's greatest music booms--the Memphis blues, traveling with none other than B.B. King himself. Artis' dream for a better life away from Jim Crow in the South led him north to Chicago, where he was introduced to industrial packaging. His mastery of this field laid the groundwork for decades of success that yielded not only a CEO title and a multi million-dollar empire, but the opportunity to become a sought-after partner by top corporations and later the Obama Administration."

By Rebecca Traister (2018, Nonfiction, 280 pp.)

"In the year 2018, it seems as if women’s anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men."

By Ernst F. Schumacher (1973, reprint 2010; Nonfiction, 350 pp.)

"Hailed as an 'eco-bible' by Time magazine, E.F. Schumacher's riveting, richly researched statement on sustainability has become more relevant and vital with each year since its initial publication during the 1973 energy crisis. A landmark statement against 'bigger is better' industrialism, Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful paved the way for twenty-first century books on environmentalism and economics... This timely reissue offers a crucial message for the modern world struggling to balance economic growth with the human costs of globalization."

By Ta-Nehisi Coates (2019, Fiction, 400 pp.)

"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures."

By Robin DiAngelo (2018, Nonfiction, 154 pp.)

"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, anti-racist educator Robin DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what can be done to engage more constructively. "

By Nancy Isenberg (2016, Nonfiction, 460 pp.)

"The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery.

Reconstruction pitted "poor white trash" against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows... Marginalized as a class, 'white trash' have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity."

Polling ends Friday, March 13, 2020 at 9 p.m.