This book reorients the concept of racism from the idea of race to assumptions of caste, familiar from India but relevant to the essential cultural definition of an entire people.
It also engages Nazi definitions of Jews as a race (though omitting Native Amerindians). It is very readable but well-researched and powerful in its indictments of overlaps between caste and class, defining an underclass in restrictive, racial terms, through cultural norms of group dehumanization.
All Americans should read this book and rethink how they were raised and how their hometown society operated.
THE TIME NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR | #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Powerful and timely ... I cannot recommend it strongly enough" - Barack Obama
From one of America's most celebrated and insightful writers, the moving, eye-opening bestseller about what lies hidden under the surface of ordinary lives
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human…
The kind of history I love—a significant short period, examined closely but through the lives of wildly different individuals, from Columbus to Luther, who changed society, thought, and culture and brought on the seeds of our modern world.
This is highly readable and constantly shifting in focus in each biography-based contribution. This is storytelling through individual lives but with major consequences.
In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, THE VERGE tells the story of a period that marked a decisive turning point for both European and world history. Here, author Patrick Wyman examines two complementary and contradictory sides of the same historical coin: the world-altering implications of the developments of printed mass media, extreme taxation, exploitative globalization, humanistic learning, gunpowder warfare, and mass religious conflict in the long term, and their intensely disruptive consequences in the short-term.
As told through the lives of ten real people -- from famous figures like Christopher Columbus and wealthy banker Jakob…
This is an engrossing, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, convincingly written in a first-person Appalachian voice about a young man’s ups and downs in his formative years from foster youth to football stardom to painkiller addiction on the path to self-discovery and life lessons.
This is the kind of story, like a powerful biography of someone famous, full of twists and turns, and also reveals the life and values of a truly distinctive American region (Blue Ridge).
This is loosely based on Dickens’s David Copperfield but not dependent on knowing that work is impressive in its transposition of Victorian England into rural America. It is readable, absorbing, and memorable.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
Europe Views the World examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples and places around the globe during and after the so-called 'Age of Exploration'.
Beginning with the medieval imagery of Europe's imagined alien races, and with an emphasis on the artists of Northern Europe, Larry Silver takes the reader on a tour across continents, from the Americas to Africa and Asia.
Encompassing works such as prints, paintings, maps, tapestries, and sculptural objects, this book addresses the overall question of an emerging European self-definition through the evidence of visual culture, however biased, about the wider world in its component parts.
This book is full of adventure but set in constantly shifting visits to other continents and other periods of history.
It includes plenty of discussion of animal life and foreign peoples or historical heroes. We read about twenty of these books, whose illustrations, esp the
more recent ones in color, enlivened the story for a boy who cannot yet read but is
powerfully engaged in good stories.
These books plant interests in history, travel, the environment, and other kids trying new things.
Eight-year-old Jack and his little sister, Annie, are playing in the woods during their summer holiday, when they find a mysterious tree house full of books. But these are no ordinary books . . . And this is no ordinary tree house . . .
Jack and Annie get more than they had bargined for when Jack opens a book about dinosaurs and wishes he could see them for real. They end up in prehistoric times with Pteranodons, Triceratops and a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex! How will they get home again? The race is on . . . !
