Books like Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt — picked by fans

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities… show more.

One of the most important new issues faced by rights advocates is climate change. Macarthur genius award-winner Catherine Coleman Flowers is on the front line of that fight, based on her own childhood as the daughter of an activist Black family in Lowndes County, Alabama. This memoir captures Flowers’ essence: someone who just can’t let an injustice slide by. And she will talk to anyone who might be able to help, including with cleaning up the raw sewage that continues to poison the homes of many poor Alabamians. Flowers clearly describes the link between local rights issues and the global campaign to deal with climate change.

To read Trace is to go on a mesmerizing journey with the wisest of guides. Savoy searches for American identities, and her own multifaceted ones, in the history and memory of landscapes across the continent. Every turn reveals tragic histories and surprising connections and omissions with the most beautiful language. Savoy excavates the palimpsest of stories embedded in landscapes’ histories in a helpful reminder that “nature” is always entangled with the richness and complexity of human life. With each careful word, Savoy deepened my appreciation for how landscape absorbs and reflects its history—and my admiration for her unbelievable gifts as a writer. Trace is one of those books you can read each year and your respect for it grows and the insights from it enlarge your life every time.

This is a glorious read that supplies verve, love, and heart. Two siblings are still living with their mother in their fifties in poverty and isolation. There is a serious risk of the inability to cope following their mother's demise. Music is a theme running throughout this charming story of resilience, and the survival instinct.

The two find they are living on the fringes of society, however, the ending proves that light can be spun from darkness.

The author’s account of grinding, unrelentless poverty and neglect, set against her eventual, miraculous escape to a different life made me cheer.

Bravely, Kerry Hudson returns to the scenes of many crimes committed against her to really understand why the past refuses to let her go and whether anything has changed for deprived families in those rundown British towns she grew up in.

In an early chapter the author recalls being pushed between two adults across a table. She thought it was a game, but her parents were in fact arguing over who should keep her. Neither was willing.

This is an important and shameful piece of British social history and an unflinching examination of a dysfunctional family with different recollections of the past. 

This is a brilliant anthropological field study of how rural migrants and laid-off Chinese workers cope with their lot in a region where factories have shut down and there are few ways of earning money.

The two competing groups are both very poorly served by the government and they are forced to live among trash with little to no welfare. There are here, again, copious quotations from the people involved and you can learn a lot about the varying conditions that mark the different lives of these two groups of people.

I loved this book, even as it made me so angry at the way this country treats workers who are, in fact, essential. I read it years ago, before I met and got to know its author, and was immediately swept up by its remarkable but very simple premise: entering incognito into low-wage working life in communities across the country—and writing about it.

I was fascinated by this raw, behind-the-scenes look at the ugly underside of restaurants, hotels, and big box stores, among other staples of American life. I was engaged by the author’s authentic and distinctive voice. I felt like I was listening to a friend recount, in detail, her visit to a strange yet also familiar land. 

Jacqueline Novogratz was a successful young woman with a promising career in banking who wanted to truly understand global poverty and find ways to tackle it.

This book tells not only the remarkable story of a favorite hand-knit blue sweater she donated in Virginia and saw again in Rwanda, but her own sometimes fumbling ways to connect her experiences to women living in poverty.

I love this book for its honesty and how the author shares her own mistakes as well as understandings.

Booth is an extraordinary writer and Tyrell is her signature story. Tyrell is a young man living under incredible pressure with a family that needs him to have both feet on the ground. But he's always on the verge of going the wrong way. Will the need for fast money put him in prison like his father? Booth is in complete command of her characters, story and pacing here. A marvelous book that will make you grateful for your own choices in life.