Showing titles in Activists

Axel Kirschner was a lifelong New Yorker, all Queens hustle and bravado. But he was also undocumented. After a minor traffic violation while driving his son to kindergarten, Axel was deported to Guatemala, a country he swore he had not lived in since he was a baby. While fighting his way back through Mexico on a migrant caravan, Axel met Levi Vonk, a young anthropologist and journalist from the US. That chance encounter would change both of their lives forever.

Mahatma Gandhi is a world-famous pacifist figure who managed to lead the Indian independence movement against British rule by employing nonviolent civil disobedience. His ethics and unwavering stance inspired movements for civil rights and freedom all across the world, long after his assassination in 1948.

In 1962, boxing writers and fans considered Cassius Clay an obnoxious self-promoter, and few believed that he would become the heavyweight champion of the world. But Malcolm X, the most famous minister in the Nation of Islam, saw the potential in Clay, not just for boxing greatness, but as a means of spreading the Nation’s message. The two became fast friends, keeping their interactions secret from the press for fear of jeopardizing Clay’s career.

Robert Hoge was born with a giant tumour on his forehead, severely distorted facial features and legs that were twisted and useless. His mother refused to look at her son, let alone bring him home. But home he went, to a life that, against the odds, was filled with joy, optimism and boyhood naughtiness. Home for the Hoges was a bayside suburb of Brisbane. Robert's parents, Mary and Vince, knew that his life would be difficult, but they were determined to give him a typical Australian childhood.

After growing up in a conservative middle-class Republican household and working several years as a left-wing journalist, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism and became an anomaly in American life for the next 50 years. As an orthodox Catholic, political radical, and a rebel who courted controversy, she attracted three generations of admirers. A believer in civil disobedience, Day went to jail several times protesting the nuclear arms race. She was critical of capitalism and US foreign policy, and as skeptical of modern liberalism as political conservatism.

An intimate and revealing portrait of civil rights icon and longtime US congressman John Lewis, linking his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to the present - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of America.

In Mandela, former foreign correspondent Bob Crew demystifies the icon and his legacy. After over a decade of travels in South Africa, Crew seeks truth in the unexpected details of the lives of Mandela and current South African president Jacob Zuma, comparing them to other world icons in order to bring a new understanding of their legacies to Western listeners.

In Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in reeducation camps. One of the incarcerated-whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end date-is Ilham Tohti, an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. Here are Tohti's own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections.

At the age of 16, Cyntoia Brown, a victim of sex trafficking, was arrested for killing a man who had picked her up for sex. Two years later, she was sentenced to life in prison. In this audiobook, written over the 15 years she was incarcerated, Cyntoia shares her most intimate experiences as an inmate. A coming-of-age memoir set against the shocking backdrop of a life behind bars, Free Cyntoia takes you on a spiritual journey as Cyntoia struggles to overcome a legacy of family addiction and a lifetime of feeling ostracized and abandoned by society.

Oil and Honey is McKibben's account of two necessary and mutually reinforcing sides of the global climate fight - from the center of the maelstrom and from the growing hive of small-scale local answers. With empathy and passion he makes the case for a renewed commitment on both levels, telling the story of raising one year’s honey crop and building a social movement that’s still cresting.

"This book has the important element that is missing in most of the books and articles on Garvey - a political analysis of what the Garvey Movement was about." (John Henrik Clarke, The Black Scholar) A classic study of the Garvey movement, this is the most thoroughly researched book on Garvey's ideas by a historian of Black nationalism.

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one humid Mississippi night in 1966. Carmichael’s life changed that day, and so did America’s struggle for civil rights. "Black Power" became the slogan of an era, provoking a national reckoning on race and democracy. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael.

Renowned sociologist Janice Johnson Dias has devoted her life to nurturing and training girls to become changemakers - whether through her investment in her daughter Marley’s humanitarian projects or through her work with the GrassROOTS Community Foundation “SuperCamp” she cofounded for girls. In these unprecedented times, her work has never been more urgent, as parents find themselves asking: How do we teach girls to change the world?

Un uomo si ferma di fronte alla scuola che ha frequentato a sedici anni e vede uscire il ragazzo che è stato, quello che ancora ha un futuro tutto da immaginare. L'uomo sa che quel ragazzo è solo, e il suo cammino non sarà facile. Vorrebbe poterlo aiutare, ma non gli è concesso. Può però radunare intorno a lui dei compagni di viaggio che lo guidino, che lo facciano sentire meno solo, perché i nostri destini individuali compongono, insieme, l'unica grande avventura della storia umana.

On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event.

In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People’s homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, 40 young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground.

Having conversations about race is uncomfortable. But for progress between individuals (and our communities) to happen, we need to be able to speak openly and honestly. Podcast hosts of The Kinswomen Yseult and Hannah use their own friendship and experiences from different racial backgrounds to offer guidance on navigating these layered conversations. In Real Friends Talk About Race, the duo share their two perspectives on the ways in which culture, history, and white supremacy have prevented us from having the skills to build trust and healthy relationships across race.

Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit.

There are many tales of his military might and strong character, there are those who see Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a hero and the greatest socialist mind of his time, but there are those who see him as a ruthless military leader who executed people without trials and who violated several human rights. Very few men have been subject to as much mysticism and admiration as Ernesto Guevara. His image has been used as the symbol for revolution, freedom, and rebellion in every corner of the world.

As he stumbled through high school, struggling to find a community among other fans of punk rock music, Christian Picciolini was recruited by a now notorious white power skinhead leader and encouraged to fight with the movement to "protect the white race from extinction." Soon, he had become an expert in racist philosophies, a terror who roamed the neighborhood, quick to throw fists. When his mentor was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison, 16-year-old Picciolini took over the man's role as the leader of an infamous neo-Nazi skinhead group.