An NPR Best Book of the Year A Washington Post Best Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Fall "Best Read" An Alma most anticipated book of November
From the prize-winning author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a stunning graphic narrative of newly discovered stories from Jewish teens on the cusp of WWII.
When I Grow Up is New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein’s new graphic nonfiction book, based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teens on the brink of WWII―found in 2017 hidden in a Lithuanian church cellar.
Dineh took me inside the experience of a young
girl growing up in the “Fiddler on the Roof” world at the turn of the 20th
Century.
Like James Joyce’s Dubliners, it begins in the mindset of a very young child whose world gradually opens up
and opens out as she grows up. The book
is chock-full of everyday life -- details about household tasks, farm
animals, and country landscapes -- and
also teeming with family drama and the pressures of the larger world.
My favorite scene is reflected on the book’s
cover. A tree growing beside the girl’s
bedroom is so close that in summer, the branches grow right into the room,
bringing the natural world right into her dreams.
Available in English translation for the first time, Dineh, posthumously published, is an autobiographical Yiddish-language novel by Ida Maze (1893-1962). Dineh is a pastorale laced with beauty and sorrow and a bildungsroman told from the point of view of a young girl. Living in what is now Belarus, Maze's eponymous heroine is fuelled by her hunger for learning, connection to family and community, and love of the natural world.
Maze interweaves Dineh's story with portraits of others, chiefly women and girls, in her community. We meet the mysterious seamstress Shprintse; Beyle, who leaves home to work as a maidservant in…
I
lived through some of the events that Lane Windham describes in her
super-readable and super-informative account of how new types of workers
challenged both their employers and the American labor movement to listen to
them and improve their work lives.
Shipyard workers, department store workers,
office workers – these groups figured out new ways to raise their voices and
“knock on the door” to make themselves heard. The result was big changes in their own lives, in the workplace, and in
America’s unions.
Today, we’re seeing a surge of labor organizing just as groundbreaking as the
initiatives Lane Windham describes. This
made the book especially relevant for me.
The power of unions in workers' lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers'…
9 to 5 wasn't just a comic film—it was a
movement built by working women. Ellen Cassedy was there, and she tells the story. Her lively firsthand account will embolden anyone striving for fair
treatment and a better world.
Ten office workers started out sitting in a circle
and sharing the problems they encountered on the job. In a few short years,
they built a nationwide movement that united people of diverse races, classes,
and ages.
The women office workers who rose up to win rights and respect on the
job transformed workplaces throughout America. And along the way came Dolly
Parton's toe-tapping song and a hit movie inspired by their work.
