Growing up in New York, the child of New Yorkers, every corner was replete with memories and histories that taught me life values. Walking through these meaningful places, I learned that the multiplicity of people’s stories and struggles to make space for themselves were what made the city and enriched everyone’s lives. The books here echo the essential politics and personal connections of those stories, and all have been deeply meaningful to me. Now, with my firm Buscada, and in my writing and art practice, I explore the way people’s stories of belonging and community, resistance and rebuilding from cities around the globe help us understand our shared humanity.
I wrote...
The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places
This book has never been far from my mind since I first read it. I love it because of its incredible thoughtfulness about place, its honest, personal, and political connection to land, and its exquisite storytelling of the embodied and culture-making experience of walking.
This isn’t a book that tells you what to think; it lets you find your way. Raja Shehadeh eloquently focuses on the personal, the physical, the beautiful, and the loved. Following his stories, following his walks, helped me understand one of the most complex and brutalized places on the planet.
To read Shehadeh’s walks and his fears for the lands where he walks is to feel this place very personally. The way his walks become increasingly circumscribed over time as the book progresses broke my heart and made Palestine clear to me as a beloved and embodied place in a way no news report ever could.
Raja Shehadeh is a passionate hill walker. He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel.
In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at…
This book manages to be both personal and political, valuing people’s stories and experiences while explaining the way redlining and urban renewal impact individuals over generations.
Mindy Fullilove doesn’t just talk about what happened when the brutality and racism of urban renewal uprooted diverse communities; she tells how it felt and what we can do now. Fullilove has been described as “the town shrink,” and her insistence on and commitment to cities as spaces where people’s well-being should be cared for is inspiring.
In this book, she tells real stories of neighbors in Pittsburgh, PA, Newark, NJ, and Roanoke, VA–not places on which many books focus. As I read, her narrative expanded my mind about the ways we are all connected through our humanity and these often painful histories of place and what that connection implies for all of our futures.
Root Shock examines 3 different U.S. cities to unmask the crippling results of decades-old disinvestment in communities of color and the urban renewal practices that ultimately destroyed these neighborhoods for the advantage of developers and the elite.
Like a sequel to the prescient warnings of urbanist Jane Jacobs, Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove reveals the disturbing effects of decades of insensitive urban renewal projects on communities of color. For those whose homes and neighborhoods were bulldozed, the urban modernization projects that swept America starting in 1949 were nothing short of an assault. Vibrant city blocks - places rich in culture -…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
For me, this book is a touchstone for what work on cities and photography can be.
Photographer Margaret Morton does what I always wanted to see in a photo book about places, cities, and houses. She combines beautiful photographs, sensitive to intimacy and respect for the people and homes she photographs, with real oral histories. It puts the words and stories of people who live in temporary dwellings—you could call them homeless—on an equal footing with Morton’s photographs of their self-built homes.
You can tell that both the interviews and the photographs emerged from real relationships and real mutual respect.
Over a ten-year period, Margaret Morton documented the inventive ways in which homeless people in New York City have created not only places to live but also communities that offer a sense of pride, place and individuality. Morton's camera reveals the ingenuity of builders who have constructed homes out of discarded materials such as warehouse pallets, junked auto parts and demolition scrap. Her luminous photographs bring to light the determination and aesthetic sensibilities of all but forgotten people whose temporary encampments became permanent homes until they were demolished by the city. Seen together with compelling oral histories told by the…
The people in this book shaped the spaces and sidewalks of a city I know well. Prithi Kanakamedala’s telling of four Black families’ stories and the ways they shaped Brooklyn gave depth to my own way of thinking, writing, and caring about the borough.
I love this book because it makes people who are often absent from written histories feel vital and real–it introduces us to Black people who have agency in shaping their own lives and places, and specifically, to brilliant Black women who are almost invisible in the archive.
I could imagine talking with these people, seeing the signs they saw, hearing the smells they smelled, and walking their streets; the book allowed me to see how Black people shaped their place–and shaped the place Brooklyn would become–and how this making of the place was really making the arguments for freedom. What else could you want?
Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City's most populous borough through their search for social justice
Before it was a borough, Brooklyn was our nation's third largest city. Its free Black community attracted people from all walks of life-businesswomen, church leaders, laborers, and writers-who sought to grow their city in a radical anti-slavery vision. The residents of neighborhoods like DUMBO, Fort Greene, and Williamsburg organized and agitated for social justice. They did so even as their own freedom was threatened by systemic and structural racism, risking their safety for the sake of their city. Brooklynites recovers the lives…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
It’s hard to know quite where to begin with this book–there is so much to love.
This book tells the story of the Great Migration of African American people out of the South across the United States to Chicago, New York, California, and beyond; it transforms and fills in a crucial part of American history that every American should know to understand our present day. But for me, what I love most starts with the way Isabel Wilkerson cares for people’s stories.
Wilkerson tells this decades-long, sweeping, under-told story through individual stories that are so detailed and compelling, so thoroughly contextualized with historical research, that I was completely enmeshed in these people’s lives, their struggles, their loves, and their feelings. I cared. In the years since I read it, stories from the book often come to my mind, teaching and guiding me like the words of a beloved relative.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste 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. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official…
In my book, I introduce the eminently personable and deeply political stories of residents who took me on “guided tours” of their neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakland, California. Through their tours, the book reveals “placework,” the way unassuming places foster belonging and help us be together with strangers and neighbors across differences.
My tour guides’ stories, alongside the photographs I made of the places they took me, illuminate what's at stake in our everyday places—from diners to churches to donut shops—and what we risk losing when they are threatened by gentrification and disinvestment. We’re part of a shared society with a shared fate, and my book helps us see how everyday places can be spaces of liberation to build the cities we need.
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
