Here are 90 books that I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself fans have personally recommended if you like
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself.
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I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s resilience—how we hold onto life and find meaning in it when everything seems to be falling apart. As a queer and genderqueer author, I especially love to see stories about queer characters in all of their human messiness, characters who aren’t forced to be models of perfection in order to earn readers’ empathy, stories that show us queer people don’t deserve dignity because we’re perfect; we deserve it because we’re human. These five novels have affected me deeply because they don’t shy away from the complexities of grief, love, parenting, trauma, sex, social justice, gender identity, and more.
Against the backdrop of a speculative future in which extra shadows have become the alternative to prison and cameras watch our every move,I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myselftakes a raw, honest look at grief, family, queerness, and how we survive.
Kris has lost her wife Beau and gained an extra shadow—along with a child who also has an extra shadow. As she navigates her new reality, Kris can either sink deeper into her grief, accepting a life of surveillance and oppression for herself and her kid, or she can choose love and hope.
Crane’s approach to storytelling, open and vulnerable and using small fragments and pop quizzes, allowed me deep into Kris’s heart, and I rooted for her as she forged a life against all odds.
Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state
In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.
“The alien abduction meets lesbian yearning novel that will restore your faith in the universe. Ilana Masad excavates the juiciness of historical archives and the otherworldly mysteries of the everyday in her most brilliant work yet.” –Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
I’m the author of two published novels and dozens of short stories, essays, and memoirs. I write about education, crime, and public safety, and I work to improve educational and career opportunities for young people in New York and other cities.
Is our criminal justice system too harsh or too lenient on crime? To answer this question, Barry Latzer, retired professor at John Jay, offers both facts and historical perspective in his history of punishment since colonial days. Latzer does not gloss over the historic racism and cruelty of policing in the U.S. but shows that today most people in prison are actually there for committing violent crimes, and that the new technology of “e-carceration” can further reduce prison populations while improving public safety.
Justice is on trial in the United States. From police to prisons, the justice system is accused of overpunishing. It is said that too many Americans are abused by the police, arrested, jailed, and imprisoned. But the denunciations are overblown. The data indicates, contrary to the critics, that we don’t imprison too many, nor do we overpunish. This becomes evident when we examine the crimes of prisoners and the actual time served. The history of punishment in the United States, discussed in vivid detail, reveals that the treatment of offenders has become progressively more lenient. Corporal punishment is no more.…
Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method.The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.
Cohen offers a comprehensive sweep of the financial and non-financial consequences of criminal behavior, crime prevention, and society’s response to crime, public and private.
Crime costs are far-reaching, including medical costs, lost wages, property damage, pain and suffering, and reduced quality of life for victims and the public at large, as well as public expenditures on police, courts, and prisons, and the costs borne by offenders and their families, who often suffer consequences apart from the punishments they receive for committing crime.
This book presents a comprehensive view of the financial and non-financial consequences of criminal behavior, crime prevention, and society's response to crime. Crime costs are far-reaching, including medical costs, lost wages, property damage and pain, suffering, and reduced quality of life for victims and the public at large; police, courts, and prisons; and offenders and their families who may suffer consequences incidental to any punishment they receive for committing crime.
The book provides a comprehensive economic framework and overview of the empirical methodologies used to estimate costs of crime. It provides an assessment of what is known and where the…
“The alien abduction meets lesbian yearning novel that will restore your faith in the universe. Ilana Masad excavates the juiciness of historical archives and the otherworldly mysteries of the everyday in her most brilliant work yet.” –Ruth Madievsky, author of All-Night Pharmacy
I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
This book tells of the shocking axe murder of a white woman in rural Virginia in 1895, and the trials of three Black women who were accused of the crime. Given the time and place, you would not expect things to go well for those Black defendants. But as with the murder drama that I describe in my book, many things about this case defy expectations. A surprising group of people, Black and white, worked together to achieve some measure of justice. This book definitely served as a model for me as I was writing my own. And the author’s attention to detail, with every fact carefully documented, truly makes it a marvel of historical research.
It's 1895 in Virginia, and a white woman lies in her farmyard, murdered with an ax. Suspicion soon falls on a young black sawmill hand, who tries to flee the county. Captured, he implicates three women, accusing them of plotting the murder and wielding the ax. In vivid courtroom scenes, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Suzanne Lebsock recounts their dramatic trials and brings us close to women we would never otherwise know: a devout (and pregnant) mother of nine; another hard-working mother (also of nine); and her plucky, quick-tempered daughter. All claim to be innocent. With the danger of lynching high, can…
I am intrigued by the diversity of human responses to suffering. As a social scientist, I've had the great fortune to carry out research in Israel, Okinawa (Japan), and the US. People in each of these countries have experienced horrific events, and they deal with the suffering they’ve endured in very different ways. In Israel and Okinawa, people seem to understand that suffering is a natural part of life and come together to deal with the aftermath of tragedy. In the US, in contrast, we tend to treat tragedy as an individual trauma that leads to emotional pathology, and our responses tend to be limited to therapy, medicine, and drugs.
I cannot get Shayne’s story out of my mind! It tells the stories of six very different individuals from diverse backgrounds with various access to health care and other resources. All six struggle with mental illness. And all six end up incarcerated and, finally, dead. But it’s Shayne’s story that I (and my students) can’t stop thinking about.
Shayne was a bright and beautiful child who grew up in a close and loving family. By the time she was eleven, Shayne had begun to make inappropriate comments, sneak out of her house at night, and lose interest in school. At age fourteen, she was found in a park with a young man and some beer. She refused to tell her therapist what she had been doing there but mentioned that she felt people could read her mind. A physician who met her just the one time diagnosed her as psychotic…
Crazy in America shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and other serious psychological illnesses are regularly incarcerated because alternative care is not available. Once behind bars, they are frequently punished again for behaviour that is psychotic, not criminal. A compelling and important examination of a shocking human rights abuse in our midst, Crazy in America is an indictment of a society that incarcerates its weakest and most vulnerable citizens , causing them to emerge sicker and more damaged.
I am an award-winning author who has written books for all ages and genres – a Young Adult historical novel, several works of non-fiction for middle school students, two picture books for children, an adult work of non-fiction, and an adult memoir. I love a great story, and, for each book, I target the audience I believe is best suited to my narrative. Several of my books were inspired by my mother’s story of childhood immigration as she fled Nazi Germany for America and the emotional legacy of that experience.
A gripping collage of moving stories of the poor, the wrongly convicted, and the marginalized, and Bryan Stevenson’s efforts to fight for their freedom. In this compelling Young Adult edition, Stevenson engages readers with his riveting storytelling. The author, who won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, makes complicated legal issues understandable for young people. I picked this book because I believe every student should read it to understand the American judicial system. Many will find Bryan Stevenson so inspiring that they want to follow in Stevenson’s footsteps.
The young adult adaptation of the acclaimed, #1 New York Times bestseller Just Mercy--now a major motion picture starring Michael B. Jordan, Jaime Foxx, and Brie Larson and the subject of an HBO documentary feature!
In this very personal work--adapted from the original #1 bestseller, which the New York Times calls "as compelling as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so"--acclaimed lawyer and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson offers a glimpse into the lives of the wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to fight for their freedom.
Stevenson's story is one of working to protect basic human rights…
In my graduate studies, I had a fantastic professor who was able to make the politics of international criminal justice one of my favorite subjects. The intersection of law, politics, peace, and conflict pulled me in. But the fact that it also touches on human rights, state sovereignty, and the prevention of mass atrocities got me hooked. I ended up doing extensive research on the International Criminal Court and how it interacts with UN peace operations, and I have subsequently been teaching peace and justice at Leiden University. I publish regularly on these topics as well and am the associate editor of International Peacekeeping, one of the leading journals on international conflict management.
Many authors who write about international criminal justice forget that those who are the subject of criminal investigations have their own interests and goals in how they respond. The states in which these investigations take place try to use the courts and tribunals for their own purposes, like neutralizing opposition or presenting themselves as good international citizens.
In this book, Clark reports on his decade-long investigation into the effect of the ICC on politics in African states, especially the DRC and Uganda. I love how he draws on a variety of sources and hundreds of interviews to produce a detailed and nuanced story.
There are a number of controversies surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Africa. Critics have charged it with neo-colonial meddling in African affairs, accusing it of undermining national sovereignty and domestic attempts to resolve armed conflict. Here, based on 650 interviews over 11 years, Phil Clark critically assesses the politics of the ICC in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing particularly on the Court's multi-level impact on national politics and the lives of everyday citizens. He explores the ICC's effects on peace negotiations, national elections, domestic judicial reform, amnesty processes, combatant demobilisation and community-level accountability and reconciliation.…
I’m a law professor at Boston University who has studied and written about constitutional law, democracy, and inequality for over 20 years. I’m troubled by America’s rise to become the world’s leader in imprisoning its own citizens and the continued use of inhumane policing and punishment practices. These trends must be better understood before we can come up with a form of politics that can overcome our slide into a darker version of ourselves.
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.
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
Longlisted for the National Book AwardOne of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017Former public defender James Forman, Jr. is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of colour. In LOCKING UP OWN OWN, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation's urban centres.Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges and police chiefs took office amid…
I am a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach in the Department of African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. I also direct the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies and am the principal investigator of the Coroner Report Project within the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies. My research team is documenting how the death investigation system is failing to tell us the truth about Americans who lose their lives in jail and during arrest. I've written about this problem in several reports, journal articles, and now my latest book, The Coroner's Silence.
Gilmore's Golden Gulag helps us see why California is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet, but also home to the largest carceral system in the world.
She connects the evaporation of the social safety net and disruptions to stable employment by global capitalism to provide the answer: California uses prisons to absorb the surplus labor created by the greed, racism, and inequality of the global economy.
Read this book, and you will understand why, in my book, so many people I wrote about were pushed through our carceral system in California and never returned home.
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called 'the biggest prison building project in the history of the world'. "Golden Gulag" provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how…
Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method.The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.
This book presents contrasting views on the privatization of policing: whether it is mostly a good thing, its downsides, and which aspects of policing lend themselves to privatization.
Forst argues that a blend of public and private policing can provide a more equitable and efficient delivery of policing services than can public police alone.
Manning, unfriendly to economics and management efficiency, takes a dramaturgical perspective, concluding that those paradigms are fundamentally at odds with the traditional policing mandate, which confers on the government a monopoly on the use of coercion.
The increasing reliance on private security services raises questions about the effects of privatization on the quality of public police forces, particularly in high-crime, low-income areas. In an effective pro-and-con format, two experts on policing offer two strikingly different perspectives on this trend towards privatization. In the process, they provide an unusually thoughtful discussion of the origins of both the public police and the private security sectors, the forces behind the recent growth of private security operations, and the risks to public safety posed by privatization. In his critique of privatization, Peter K. Manning focuses on issues of free market…
