Forthcoming

Cory Johnson’s death, in a shooting near his home in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, shattered his family and his wide circle of friends. Cory had been one of their stars, a charismatic young man with high hopes and a gift for connecting with people and making them believe in him.

His death brought home to his family, and members of the church that supported them, how pervasive grief was in their community, and how unprepared they were to handle it. The often-hidden health risks posed by grief and bereavement only added to the inequality faced by the residents of Roxbury every day.

Roxbury Presbyterian Church, where Cory’s family worshipped, had long been central in their lives, but addressing issues of mental health was not something they were equipped to do. Liz Walker, its minister, watched as the families in her neighborhood struggled, and decided to reach beyond the church walls for help.

Looking back at her own life as a preacher’s daughter in Little Rock, Arkansas, and as well as forward as the program she launched is replicated in communities across New England and the country, Can We Talk is an important, impassioned narrative.

From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter Letters from an American, a vital narrative that explains how America, once  a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy — and how we can turn back.

In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. The essays soon turned into a newsletter and, spread by word of mouth, its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on its plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.

In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Richardson’s unique talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the historical roots and precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. Writing in her trademark calm prose, she manages to be both realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Richardson’s easy command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”

There are many books that tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, community bail funds surged, as a form of protest and a focus of philanthropic energy. While they were hardly new, bail funds garnered attention as an effective and individual means of responding to the failures of the police and the courts and a way to channel outrage in a pandemic era. And these funds have made a difference – after months of uprisings, thousands of protesters and ordinary people were freed from jail as millions of dollars were donated to bail funds nationwide.

In Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration, Jocelyn Simonson, who has written extensively about the ways that social movements shift our views of justice, looks at bail funds and other ground-up actions that are, one by one, effecting social change and contesting preconceived notions about freedom and safety. She explores the problematic idea that individuals who are prosecuted are not the people who matter when it comes to politics. Actions like bail funds, courtwatching, and people’s budgets give agency to these individuals and their families and loved ones, and force us to recognize the deep forms of violence in each and every corner of the carceral state.

By focusing on the reforms that shift power to the people who are most directly affected by the system, Radical Acts of Justice proposes that communal resistance within the system is a form of justice-making itself. The stories of grassroots activism that Jocelyn Simonson follows are a reminder of the power, and unpredictability, of planting many seeds. These forms of resistance open up transformational possibilities that would otherwise elude us and that can lead to change that is both urgent and necessary.

Three of the nation’s top researchers known for taking on key mysteries about poverty deliver a new, multi-dimensional way of measuring deep disadvantage in every county in the nation as well as in its 500 most-populated cities. By turning the lens of disadvantage from the individual to the community, the authors uncover a surprising picture. Among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged places in the U.S., the majority are rural, many of them rarely if ever researched; only 12 are cities.

In The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, the authors paint portraits of places within the three regions of America whose residents are living—and dying—with homicide rates as high as anywhere else in the nation. What these regions have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation, has made them into what the authors describe as “internal colonies.”

This history and its reverberations are facts, these acclaimed and engaged public scholars argue, that must shape a new War on Poverty, 60 years after LBJ’s unfinished first one.