Here are 100 books that Nigger fans have personally recommended if you like
Nigger.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
I am Nadine Strossen’s Number One fan. What an amazing career–daughter of a Holocaust survivor, directly targeted by Nazi hate speech, yet today Professor Strossen stands out as America’s most prominent advocate of free speech.
Having served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union for an impressive term of more than fifteen years, Strossen used this book to outline in a concise yet fact-filled way the reasons why hateful attitudes are damaging, yet legal punishments on individual speakers would be even more damaging.
HATE dispels misunderstandings plaguing our perennial debates about hate speech vs. free speech, showing that the First Amendment approach promotes free speech and democracy, equality, and societal harmony. We hear too many incorrect assertions that hate speech which has no generally accepted definition is either absolutely unprotected or absolutely protected from censorship. Rather, U.S. law allows government to punish hateful or discriminatory speech in specific contexts when it directly causes imminent serious harm, but government may not punish such speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or vaguely feared to possibly contribute to some future harm. When U.S. officials…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
I disagree with the authors’ conclusions, but I agree with their diagnosis. This book is aimed at students yet written in a style that anyone can grasp. The authors defy the old “Sticks and Stones” dictum, explaining how even seemingly mild racism feeds into deeper patterns that undermine our ability to relate to each other as citizens of a single democratic society.
Although I agree with stricter controls on internet platforms, I disagree with the authors’ proposals for punishing individual speakers. Whether you accept or reject their proposals, their account of how racist attitudes spread is passionate and compelling.
Successor and companion volume to Words that Wound, the first book to argue for recognition of hate speech as a serious social problem. The current volume greatly expands the coverage of hate speech, including chapters on children, the internet, recent cases, campus hate speech codes, and international responses. Deals expressly with arguments against hate-speech regulation, as well as the case for it.
Written by leading critical race theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, this volume succinctly explores a host of issues presented by hate speech, including legal theories for regulating it, the harms it causes, and policy arguments pro and…
Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
I found this book to be one of the best introductions to the endless dilemmas surrounding free speech. In the first half of the twentieth century, anxieties about free speech in the United States were triggered mostly on the left, with government attempts to stifle socialists and communists culminating in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, damaging and even destroying thousands of lives and careers.
Philippa Strum shows how, after the 1950s, this completely changed. The government’s increasing focus on far-right speech became an issue of burning importance when residents of a small Illinois town, home to Holocaust survivors, tried to block a Nazi march–and the courts said “No” in the name of free speech.
In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor--or was directly related to a survivor--of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Already in my teens, I became aware of the need for LGBTQ+ rights. I read whatever I could find on the topic, and when I wrote my first book it was titled Sexual Orientation: A Human Right. However, I noticed that many fellow activists advocated bans on speech hostile to LGBTQ+ people. I became skeptical about governments punishing individuals who express evil ideas. Still, I hope you will benefit from my list of books that take various sides in free speech debates and focus not only on LGBTQ+ people. After all, what’s the point of free speech if not to hear about a problem from diverse viewpoints?
Waldron’s proposals for punishing individual speakers are unpersuasive, but I admire his effort to translate difficult historical and legal material into everyday language. Many writers try to challenge American First Amendment principles by questioning the very foundations of Western parliamentary democracy.
Waldron does the opposite. He articulates his challenge by arguing that speech restrictions are faithful to the letter and spirit of a democratic constitution. I disagree–at least with the way Waldron makes his case–but he does make his case clearly, and with this book, he has influenced a generation of disciples.
Every liberal democracy has laws or codes against hate speech-except the United States. For constitutionalists, regulation of hate speech violates the First Amendment and damages a free society. Against this absolutist view, Jeremy Waldron argues powerfully that hate speech should be regulated as part of our commitment to human dignity and to inclusion and respect for members of vulnerable minorities.
Causing offense-by depicting a religious leader as a terrorist in a newspaper cartoon, for example-is not the same as launching a libelous attack on a group's dignity, according to Waldron, and it lies outside the reach of law. But defamation…
I have been writing and teaching about African American poetry and poetics for more than two decades. My passion began when I kept discovering long-lost poems that were published once, in Black newspapers, and then forgotten. I wondered why I had never learned about Gwendolyn Brooks in school, though I’d read about e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Once I stumbled on the fact that Claude McKay discovered cummings, I realized how much the questions of influence and power aren’t really central topics in thinking about the genealogy of Black poets and their influence on each other and on poetry in general.
Kevin Young’s anthology is the latest in a long line of Black poetry anthologies; the first was James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), which Young duly acknowledges. Most of Young’s choices I agree with; some I don’t (at least one of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s great sonnets should have been included); but in the main it is a terrific anthology of poets historical up to the present day. I counted almost 40 sonnets among the poems included. Readers who are interested in the dates the poems were published can turn to an extensive set of notes in the back, which are really helpful.
A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present
Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture.
I find it so inspiring to see people pull off something that seems impossible, for example, breaking into a Paris monument every night for a year in order to clandestinely repair its neglected antique clock. So, when an author draws me into a topic that seems to me dry as dust, I enjoy the book so much more than one I knew I’d find interesting.
A few years ago, an old friend proposed that we make the dictionary our next book club selection. An idea too ridiculous to resist. But which dictionary to choose?
Unless you're retired, good luck finishing the 22,000-page Oxford English Dictionary. We opted instead for the excellent American Heritage Dictionary, which at ~100 pages per month only took us two years.
For a guy who thought he knew a lot of words already, I was pulled up short fairly often by discoveries such as "callipygian," "relating to or having buttocks that are considered beautifully proportioned." And even when the word was familiar, the etymology could delight, for example, when I learned that "clue" derived from "Theseus's use of a ball of thread as a guide through the Cretan labyrinth."
The much-anticipated Fifth Edition of The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language is the premier resource about words for people who seek to know more and find fresh perspectives. Exhaustively researched and thoroughly revised, the Fifth Edition contains 10,000 new words and senses, over 4,000 dazzling new full-color images, and authoritative, up-to-date guidance on usage from the celebrated American Heritage® Usage Panel.
In keeping with the American Heritage tradition of cutting-edge research, the Fifth Edition represents the work of a dedicated team of experts, scholars, and contributors. Thousands of definitions have been revised in rapidly changing fields such as…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I am a White person who grew up in a primarily Black DC neighborhood in the 1980s. Growing up in a Black community in DC at a time when the city was experiencing a cascade of crises – from the spread of crack to an AIDS epidemic to a failing school system – has fundamentally shaped my life and my view of the world. When I returned in the early twenty-first century to my city to find it had significantly changed and that many of my Black neighbors had been pushed out, I was compelled to learn more about DC before gentrification and to understand the path the city I love had taken.
Chocolate City covers the last few centuries of history in DC.
This tome provides an in-depth overview of the history of race in Washington, DC from its founding to the present. It traces the history of race and democracy in the nation’s capital – from its days as a trading post for enslaved persons to its emergence as a booming metropolis.
By putting racial dynamics, tensions, and demographics at the center of the narrative, the authors develop a cohesive narrative that helps us to understand the multiple and consistent ways that Black DC residents have been disenfranchised and dispossessed.
Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic…
Paul D. Escott is the author of thirteen books focused on the Confederacy or the Union, is co-author of other volumes, and has written many articles and book chapters. He won research fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Whitney M. Young Jr. Foundation and is the Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus from Wake Forest University.
The decision to recruit Black soldiers made an enormous difference in the war and in politics. Black recruits to the U.S. Army equaled all the northern men lost in the first two years of fighting and proved themselves on many battlefields. Their sacrifice also made an irrefutable case for Black rights. Joseph Glatthaar’s book admirably tells the story of these soldiers and their white officers.
Sixteen months after the start of the American Civil War, the Federal government, having vastly underestimated the length and manpower demands of the war, began to recruit black soldiers. This revolutionary policy gave 180,000 free blacks and former slaves the opportunity to prove themselves on the battlefield as part of the United States Colored Troops. By the end of the war, 37,000 in their ranks had given their lives for the cause of freedom.
In Forged in Battle, originally published in 1990, award-winning historian Joseph T. Glatthaar re-creates the events that gave these troops and their 7,000 white officers justifiable…
I have spent an entire career, via reading, research, and teaching, helping people realize their dreams. For me, it represents “paying it forward,” thanking those who helped a girl from an ethnic, working-class background become an internationally recognized scholar. Studying optimism and goal-seeking has taught me that dreaming and optimism are important—but they are simply not enough to move someone forward. Dreams must become projects motivated by mentoring, planning, and hard work. Not everyone has those resources available to them. The curse of social inequality can indeed destroy hopes and dreams in the very early lives of the socially disadvantaged—with devastating consequences for society as a whole.
This book shows how powerful are the tenets of the American Dream. It also shows how our society has failed to live up to those tenets.
My most important take-away is that the growing racial divide in achieving dreams will lead to deeper and deeper fractures in the fabric of American Society.
The ideology of the American dream - the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort - is the very soul of the American nation. This book argues that Americans have failed to face up to what that dream requires of their society, and yet they possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. This text attributes America's national distress to the ways in which white and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
This clever and funny book explains that there are specific techniques that make good writing sound good, or a pithy phrase stick in the mind, and tells you the long and difficult Greek (or slightly easier Latin) names for all these rules you kind of knew without actually knowing.
I can hardly retain any of the Greek labels, but I do remember the fun little examples, like why Oscar Wilde’s epigrams are so striking (antithesis) and how Shakespeare totally lifted part ofJulius Caesarfrom a historian, but polished it up (alliteration). And whenever you hear a memorable three-part phrase, it was probably longer but everyone forgot the other bits (tricolon).
This is not one for fans of utilitarian writing, but as Forsyth says, “To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.”
From the #1 international bestselling author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon comes an education in the art of articulation, from the King James Bible to Katy Perry…
From classic poetry to pop lyrics, from Charles Dickens to Dolly Parton, even from Jesus to James Bond, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase—such as “O Captain! My Captain!” or “To be or not to be”—memorable.
In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary…
