63 books like Religion, Race, Rights

Growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Marji is outspoken and brave and one of several strong female characters in this book who challenges stereotypes and kicks ass. I loved following her political, spiritual, and personal growth.

Persepolis is a much-needed history lesson in the form of a comic book. It deals with heavy themes, but not without a generous dose of humor and heart. My students and I often spent several minutes dissecting one panel—and the last panel made some of us weep. 

It can be hard to see how religion impacts the world, but this book opened a world of perspectives for me. Written by some of the biggest names in the academic world—and including recorded conversations between them—I found this book to be essential for understanding religion’s interactions with gender, race, power, and the shifting nature of secular societies.

I always like reading the most important modern thinkers, and what I appreciate about this book is it is manageable and digestible, so it serves as a great introduction to topics that fill numerous library shelves. It caps off with a brilliant discussion by Craig Calhoun, who rounds out an eye-opening set of discussions.

Rarely has a book blown my mind like this one. Kahn lays bare the foundations of our modern political structures and how we adapt religious conceptions to imbue our states with a sacred aura. I’m fascinated by sacrifice and its place within our civic life, and this book highlights how nearly every aspect of our sovereign international system relies to some extent upon the concept.

It’s like a conceptual history of our modern nation-states that reveals them as ‘religious’ undertakings. While the other books on the list lay out the historical and sociological aspects of religion and politics, this book showed me how religion IS politics—and politics, religion—in unexpected and important ways.

This book is another that radically changed my perspective, and I use it routinely to help illustrate how complex the topics of religion and politics are.

What benefited me most is how Hurd challenges the very category of religion and how that category is (mis)applied in several countries. I love how she takes to task the simplistic narratives around religion and shows that they are not only insufficient but downright dangerous.

This book clearly outlines those dangers, their origins, and some noteworthy suggestions for how we can better deal with religion around the world. I find something new in each reread, both in terms of the contexts she analyzes and her approach. 

I found Ehrenfreund’s book compelling because he applied his legal expertise as a lawyer and judge to what he personally witnessed at the trial. His research included numerous conversations with Germans who lived through the Nazi regime. I also valued his insights as they were informed by his personal journey to learn his grandfather’s fate many years after he disappeared into the Holocaust. While Ehrenfreund reveals how U.S. law heavily influenced the law applied at Nuremberg, I found his analysis of the trial’s subsequent influence on U.S. law revealing. For example, Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at Nuremberg and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was impacted by the racial hatred that underlies the crimes of the Holocaust in Brown v. Board of Education, The U.S. Court’s school desegregation decision.

The trials of Nazi war criminals are an important but subsidiary theme in Mary Fulbrook’s book. In Francine Hirsch’s study, the most significant trial of top-ranking German officials takes center stage, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Unlike most previous analyses of Nuremberg, which depict the Soviets as minor actors who, if anything, were impediments to the quest for justice, Hirsch insists that Soviet contributions were essential cornerstones of the trial’s success. This may seem an unlikely role for a totalitarian country already responsible for terror famines in Ukraine, the atrocious show trials of the 1930s, and the senseless murder of 20,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Nonetheless, as Hirsch cogently argues, without Soviet participation the trial may never have occurred. The glory of her book is its insistence on the counterintuitive and contradictory nature of reality, in which, against all expectations, an authoritarian regime led by a… show more.

Albert Speer is one of the most enigmatic figures within the Nazi leadership. I have always been intrigued by the fact that most biographies of him – including Gitta Sereny’s famous Speer: His Battle with Truth – have been fairly benign in their judgment of Speer’s character and deeds. Although directly responsible for the slave labour programme in the later stages of the war and a member of Hitler’s inner circle until the end in 1945, Hitler’s favourite architect managed to get away with a comparatively light sentence at the Nuremberg Trials, where he admitted partial responsibility. Handsome and well-spoken, Speer was often publicly perceived as one of the “less bad” Nazis. Martin Kitchen’s biography revises that image and convincingly shows the reader how intimately involved Speer was in many of the crimes of the Nazis.

People were shocked to read about the Osage murders, but those who’ve read Angie Debo just had to sigh and shake their heads since it’s nothing new. Her 1936 work opened my eyes to the systematic devastation of the tribes, bite by bite. Forced off their homelands with removal, they were promised to hold land in Oklahoma “as long as the waters run,” but it wasn’t more than a few decades before allotment narrowed tribal holdings and opened up more land to be taken. With Native peoples not even legal citizens, anyone with money had to have a guardian, a breeding ground for amoral administrators to siphon off as much as they wanted.

To be honest, I could’ve picked any book by David Harvey–he writes about capitalism and how it affects people and the places we inhabit in a really accessible way. This brief introduction is a great way to get into his writing (a gateway book!). It is also a useful guide to thinking about contemporary issues with hope rather than despair.

Like the book by Ahmed, this one offers ideas for a socially just society, giving the reader solutions and not just problems. I think it is important when critiquing society to come up with tangible ways that we can move away from unequal systems to more equitable ones. This book makes change feel possible.

Davies offers an exceptionally clear and useful definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics.” But what really makes this book valuable is the research he has conducted on the office culture of the government officials who are actually implementing neoliberal policy—how they think, what they believe they’re achieving, and how they sometimes deviate from the letter of neoliberal theory while remaining true to its spirit.