I am shocked this book hasn't had more buzz, wasn't up for a Pulitzer. Reading this book feels like watching a documentary-- you get that "how did I not hear more about this when it was happening?" sort of feeling. For someone who has worked in community organizing, the struggles the author describes are so relatable, and for someone who hasn't, the book draws out, step-by-step, how impossible hurdles can be overcome. Soni reveals how climate change, corporate power, and immigration are all intertwined, and how people power and nourishing food (this book includes recipes!) can overcome these intersecting injustices.
"An eye-opening look at the world of global itinerant workers . . . The Great Escape is a must-read." -The New York Times Book Review The astonishing story of immigrants lured to the United States from India and trapped in forced labor-told by the visionary labor leader who engineered their escape and set them on a path to citizenship. In late 2006, Saket Soni, a twenty-eight-year-old Indian-born community organizer, received an anonymous phone call from an Indian migrant worker in Mississippi. He was one of five hundred men trapped in squalid Gulf Coast "man camps," surrounded by barbed wire, watched…
This is the type of writing I've dreamed of accomplishing. It is somehow sweeping and immersive at the same time. Gyasi doesn't look away from hardship and trauma, but also doesn't immerse us in violence just for the sake of it. Everything in this book is intentional, and necessary, and important. I learned about aspects of African and African-American history that I didn't know much about before, and I find myself thinking about many of the characters months later. This book has stuck to my bones.
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel - the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.…
This book blends personal history with national, and even international history. The ability to write at multiple scales, blending in poetry and imagery, displaying incredible vulnerability, is just so impressive. Strasser interrogates so many scales and versions of violence, challenging us to think about the many, many ripple effects of the harm entailed in building, and ultimately exploding, a nuclear bomb.
In 1942, the US government began construction on a sixty-thousand-acre planned community named Oak Ridge in a rural area west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Unmarked on regional maps, Oak Ridge attracted more than seventy thousand people eager for high-paying wartime jobs. Among them were author Emily Strasser's grandfather George, a chemist. All employees - from scientists to secretaries, from military personnel to construction workers - were restricted by the tightest security. They were provided only the minimum information necessary to perform their jobs. It wasn't until three years later that the citizens of Oak Ridge, and the rest of the world,…
Archaeology has uncovered incredible monuments and made groundbreaking discoveries, but who actually shovels the dirt, pushes the wheelbarrows, and guards the site after the research team leaves? At many archaeological sites around the world, local workers are hired to perform the manual labor of the archaeological excavation. They develop skills and expertise in archaeology from doing this work. And yet, the names and identities of these site workers have rarely been recorded or published, leaving their contributions to archaeology unrecognized. In my book, you’ll meet many of these workers. They’ll share the expertise and knowledge they’ve gained from decades of experience in archaeology, and their stories will reveal some reasons why their perspectives have been left out of so much of the history of archaeology.
