Books like Beyond Survival

I met Matthew Desmond before he became one of the youngest Professors with his own center at Princeton University. He was visiting London, had just published his first book, and was still finishing the research for this book.

Desmond did an enormous amount of field research; he spent months living in a trailer park, on top of thousands of hours in archives and courtrooms where eviction cases are decided. The result is the best book I have ever read about poverty.

What happens when ‘normal people’ get evicted? Desmond’s story is rich and personal, and that is what we need: we need to understand the lives of poor people better in order to finally decide that we must change the systems that put them there. 

Andrea Elliott, a New York Times reporter, spent nearly a decade reporting on Dasani Coates, a Black child growing up in a New York City shelter, and the result is a deeply humane look at a family in poverty.

This Pulitzer-winning book makes clear that the child protection system is a downstream solution to problems that begin with the failure of our society to meet families’ basic human needs.

As Dasani’s journey becomes public in a front page New York Times series, she is afforded an opportunity to escape poverty and become educated in an elite institution, but Elliott shows that plucking a favored child out of her family—even for the most positive of reasons—is still painful for the child.

This book, recommended to me by a professor many years ago, is a master class in writing voice. It’s not an easy book—filled with family trauma and abuse (big-time content warning here)—but it masterfully explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters.

Ruth Anne is broken by her mother’s (and stepfather’s) actions, but the others around her help to put her back together. Yet another lesson is that those who find us can sometimes be the best family for us.

Dorothy Roberts is the foremost expert on the harms of the child welfare system, which she terms the family policing system.

Her first book on the subject, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare was published in 2001 and was way ahead of the curve in naming the racist practices of a system that’s in theory designed to help children. Torn Apart is a really important update, published in 2022, that allows for a new generation of readers to grapple with a harmful system and to wrap their minds around the need for a completely different approach.

This book is so deeply tampered with by society and Western modalities of health that a book like this is necessary for the act of reclaiming our magic. Black Queer Feminist editors Cara Page and Erica Woodland showed me that collective care and radical love are vital ingredients to cultural work. Ancestral medicine and healing were not offered to queer folks, sex workers, people on many margins—and our right to magic has been taboo for too long.

I love this book because it names ancestral medicines and healing practices as necessary tools for community survival—communities that have survived centuries of violence. Community and survivor-led care strategies shaped my vision in the Next World Tarot, and this book articulates that vision as praxis. Centering disability, reproductive, environmental, and transformative justice and harm reduction, revolution becomes human.

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.

For kids who think that "history" is made only by old people who lived long ago, this accessible anthology showcases fourteen of today's young people who are speaking up. It profiles a diverse range of contemporary activists (starting at eight years old) throughout the United States, kids who have worked on issues from climate change to safe water to social justice.

The book's creative format is particularly engaging for children and educators and makes it stand out in the field of anthologies. It provides a brief biography of every young person included, followed by a poem. Each poem is written by a different poet (including such excellent writers as Nikki Grimes and Lesléa Newman) and in a different form. The back matter explains the various poetic forms used and provides additional information about the editors' research and ideas about how young people can improve their communities.

A classic, this book was one of the first to challenge prevailing white attitudes about the assimilation and acculturation of Africans and African Americans to life under slavery. Mullin describes how greater levels of assimilation translated into more effective means of protest.

While many celebrated the ethnic revival of the 1960s and the social justice causes that grew from them, Steinberg offers a powerful and challenging thesis that argues the limits of ethnicity. A sense of ethnic re-birth, he argues, can only occur once ethnicity is gone. Rather than empowering a new generation of social justice youth, ethnicity proves a myth.

One area of social justice that is often overlooked is intergenerational justice. As we deplete the planet’s resources, we pass problems along to future generations. Rather than leaving the Earth a better place for those who follow, we are leaving them with an environment at the tipping point. There are a number of science fiction and fantasy books that address this, and it’s possible that Wanderers (2019) springs to mind in part because it’s fairly recent. On the other hand, most of the books I’ve listed are decades old, and this is one of the best works of speculative fiction I’ve read in the past few years. Wendig’s epic novel provides prescient commentary on the political divisions that currently plague our nation and our world, as we split into seemingly disparate tribes, as well as the mounting environmental dangers that coming generations will face if we do not take substantive… show more.