Here are 100 books that Ordinary Notes fans have personally recommended if you like
Ordinary Notes.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I think of myself as a listener and life in progress. As a poet and author, I’m always listening to the words that move through my heart. I’m also a spiritual seeker, always looking for the Divine in the world around me and almost always surprised by the ways it shows up when I’m paying attention. Yet, there’s another part of me that is a Jersey girl through and through, looking for humor or irreverence in the face of life’s challenges. All these aspects come together in an unusual harmony, creating an openness to being changed by the things that come into my life. Hence, a list of life-changing books.
This book was released at a time of great personal reflection for me. I was involved with an organization called Coming To the Table, through which I was learning more about the legacy of enslavement in the United States. Dr. McGowan’s book provides an opportunity for deep listening to the experiences of a Black woman in America. The words and experiences were challenging to sit with because of the depth of the pain, but that is what deep listening is about, being able to be still with what I am hearing and do my best to be with it.
The poems in this collection allowed me to take a glimpse into Dr. McGowan’s life for a short time and feel the darkness she is surrounded by in our country simply because of the color of her skin. It was not an easy or comfortable experience to read i am the…
I am the Rage is not just a poetry book. It is a call-to-action. This evocative collection of thirty poems puts readers in the position of feeling, reflecting, and empathizing with what it means to be Black in America today. Dr. Martina McGowan, a doctor and grandmother who has been a victim of and an advocate against social, racial, and sexual injustices, uses powerful free verse poetry to express the range of emotions, thoughts, and grief she had following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing attacks against the Black…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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 will never forget Professor Kennedy’s welcome speech during my first week at Harvard Law School, trembling in my boots that admitting me must have been some sort of administrative error. Kennedy’s penetrating wit showed me what we need to know if we want to think effectively about complex social controversies.
That impression was powerfully confirmed when I read his outstanding book about racist speech. Tracing back through his own childhood steeped in racial discrimination, Kennedy explains the problems we cause when we allow people to voice racist ideas and the problems we cause when we try to censor them.
The twentieth anniversary edition of one of the most controversial books ever published on race and language is now more relevant than ever in this season of racial reckoning—from “one of our most important and perceptive writers on race" (The Washington Post).
In addition to a brave and bracing inquiry into the origins, uses, and impact of the infamous word, this edition features an extensive new introduction that addresses major developments in its evolution during the last two decades of its vexed history.
In the new introduction to his classic work, Kennedy questions the claim that “nigger” is the most…
When I was eight, my mother was called in to see the principal…yet again. He pulled me out of class, stood me in the hall for maximum intimidation value, then said to my mom, “Your son has no respect for authority.” Mom asked, “What about that, Larry?” My reply—and this is totally true—was, “He doesn’t mean respect. He means courtesy. You can demand courtesy, but you have to earn respect.” Those sentiments have not changed, which is why, I suppose, I have an extremely critical eye for history, especially American history, that deifies the winners. I don’t think we make ourselves stronger as a nation by pretending our leaders were somehow not as human in their flaws as the rest of us. I prefer to look under what is called “conventional wisdom,” because that’s where the real story often lies.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a renowned Harvard professor and author of a series of deeply insightful books on African American history. He has also become one of the most recognizable public figures in the nation, from the PBS series Finding Your Roots and Reconstruction to a cameo in Watchmen in which he played the United States Treasury Secretary. It can be easy to forget that “Skip” Gates was raised in the hills of West Virginia, part of a tight-knit, quirky, distinctly African American community. In Gates’ affectionate memoir detailing his growing up, a series of fascinating characters leap from the page—some Churchgoing, some anything but; some strait-laced; some definitely not; some ambitious, some content to do as little as possible to get by. Everyone we meet in Colored People is both recognizable and a revelation, and Gates has created a moving and nostalgic look at African American culture that…
A re-creation of what it was like to grow up in the hill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s. Recalling an age at which the town and people represented his known universe, Gates describes the clannish pride of the family and the sense of place that characterized Piedmont, with its beautiful countryside, its paper mill, whose sulphurous fumes permeated the air but brought the town its prosperity, and the social event of the year, the annual mill picnic. The young Gates's consciousness takes in "colored people" in a time when segregation was still influential. He tells…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
She really gets at the heart of how Brown and Black bodies are seen, and what is fascinating to me is the approach through current “technical art” and a good discussion of architecture. I had a class focus on her discussion—lengthy—about surveillance and race. It’s extremely poignant, and something whites especially just don’t think about. I will never again go through an airport without thinking about her book.
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the…
My writing background started in the newsroom where, as a reporter, my job was to interview and tell the stories of others. At one point in my career, my editors assigned me a bi-monthly column, and while I used this space to write about a variety of issues happening in the community, I also used it occasionally to write personal essays. I love this form because the personal story helps us drill down on an issue and, in essence, make deeper connections with the collective. When I left the newsroom, I continued to study and write in essay and memoir form. In my MFA program, I was able to focus on this form exclusively for two years, and I have spent many years crafting my first book-length memoir into form.
Faithful to its title, this brilliant book starts with the body — an unspeakable injury to the narrator’s body, a crime, a horror. Bernard writes with a specificity that is gut-wrenching without being sensational. And all along, running alongside the sensory language is the author’s intellectual river, constantly washing over and over a moment, a scene, a feeling, a thought. This book includes twelve interconnected essays, each building on the other despite how many years – and miles – separate them.
“Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.”
In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and…
I am a professor who teaches and works in the field of African American History. Because I am both white and Jewish, I’ve been repeatedly asked to give talks about relationships between African Americans and white Jewish Americans, and about what “went wrong” to shatter the “grand alliance” of the civil rights movement embodied by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I had no answer, but I suspected that none of the stories that we had been told, whether good or bad, were fully true. So I went back to the sources and uncovered a complex and multilayered history. Black and Jewish collaboration was never a given, and underlying tensions and conflicts reflected the broader realities of race and class in the U.S. In the book I explored how these historical and political forces operated, and continue to resonate today.
There are many wonderful, useful and thoughtful books on the subject from local studies to broader political and philosophical overviews, and while I wish I could recommend them all, I want to highlight Marc Dollinger’s book because he turns so many widely held beliefs on their heads.
He argues that far from alienating Jewish allies, Black Power actually animated them and spurred them to rethink “Jewish Power,” revitalizing Jewish political action within a civil rights context.
If there has been a divide between African American and (white) Jewish American leaders or agendas, it has at least partly been caused by losing sight of that story and ignoring the impact of white privilege on Jewish communal responses to civil rights challenges.
In this provocative critique, Marc Dollinger charts the transformation of American Jewish political culture from the Cold War liberal consensus of the early postwar years to the rise and influence of Black Power-inspired ethnic nationalism. He shows how, in a period best known for the rise of black anti-Semitism and the breakdown of the black-Jewish alliance, black nationalists enabled Jewish activists to devise a new Judeo-centered political agenda and express it in more visible forms of Jewish identity-including the emancipation of Soviet Jews, the development of a new form of American Zionism, the opening of hundreds of Jewish day schools,…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
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…
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…
As a feminist lesbian, I am always looking for legacies of lesbian leaders before me. I learned about coalitional organizing from groups like the Lavender Menace and the importance of lesbian leadership in the Combahee River Collective. I started to learn more about the movement to include women in peacebuilding. This work was formalized in 2000 with the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and the nine related resolutions that followed, in what is now known as the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. I knew lesbians were certainly part of that movement. My book is about celebrating queer and trans leaders within transnational women’s movements, including the movement for women’s participation and leadership in peacebuilding.
This book is a foundational text in Black women’s studies and includes the statement by the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective, which just celebrated 50 years. In the statement, they write, "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race."
I appreciate the book because it shows the rich history of Black women’s writing and movement building, including the important role of Black lesbian feminist sisterhood. It was so exciting to read the letter written by Lorraine Hansberry to the lesbian periodical The Ladder in 1957, in which she links homophobia to the sexual oppression experienced by all women. I can’t help but scribble in the margins: see, lesbians have always been here!
Although queer organizing is so often presented as something that is new or emerging, this book challenges…
Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism.
Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women's studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences.
As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
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.
