Here are 100 books that Torn Apart fans have personally recommended if you like
Torn Apart.
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I am an anthropologist and studied homelessness in Paris and London for the last decade. I was drawn into the world of people on the streets when I moved to London and started observing their parallel world. I spent almost a year with people on the street in London and two years in Paris. I volunteered in day centers, safe injection facilities, and soup kitchens and slept in a homeless shelter. Since I finished my first book on my observations in Paris, I have advised both policymakers on homelessness and written countless journalistic articles. My goal is always to provide a clearer picture of homelessness through the eyes of the people themselves.
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.
*WINNER OF THE 2017 PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION* 'Beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable ... If you want a good understanding of how the issues that cause poverty are intertwined, you should read this book' Bill Gates, Best Books of 2017
Arleen spends nearly all her money on rent but is kicked out with her kids in Milwaukee's coldest winter for years. Doreen's home is so filthy her family call it 'the rat hole'. Lamar, a wheelchair-bound ex-soldier, tries to work his way out of debt for his boys. Scott, a nurse turned addict, lives in a gutted-out trailer. This is…
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…
I’m an investigative journalist and author, and a decade ago I began digging into the child welfare system—what we call the patchwork web of child protection agencies around the country. The more I learned, the more I realized how this system, which is ostensibly to help children in need, is actually perpetrating deep and lasting harm on generations of children and families. These books have helped me understand how we punish poor people instead of helping them, and how our racist systems harm Black and Indigenous children. They’ve also helped me to sit with the reality of child abuse, and begin to see a different way of preventing harm and healing those who’ve been hurt.
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.
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “vivid and devastating” (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girl—from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott
“From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Library Journal
I didn’t realize for a long time that I was drawn to reading and writing quiet, character-driven stories about found families–because I didn’t know that was a thing. But here we are. As an introvert, I love learning about people and exploring their relationships with one another, and I have devoted my writing and reading life to this endeavor (even before, again, I knew this was a thing). As a child, I spent my time in libraries, falling in love with these characters. Now, as an author and professor of writing, I believe these novels are also all incredible textbooks of character creation and storytelling.
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.
A profound portrait of family dynamics in the rural South and "an essential novel" (The New Yorker)
"As close to flawless as any reader could ask for . . . The living language [Allison] has created is as exact and innovative as the language of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye." -The New York Times Book Review
The publication of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was a landmark event that won the author a National Book Award nomination and launched her into the literary spotlight. Critics have likened Allison to Harper Lee, naming her the…
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…
I’m an investigative journalist and author, and a decade ago I began digging into the child welfare system—what we call the patchwork web of child protection agencies around the country. The more I learned, the more I realized how this system, which is ostensibly to help children in need, is actually perpetrating deep and lasting harm on generations of children and families. These books have helped me understand how we punish poor people instead of helping them, and how our racist systems harm Black and Indigenous children. They’ve also helped me to sit with the reality of child abuse, and begin to see a different way of preventing harm and healing those who’ve been hurt.
Two high-profile activists have edited this anthology, which tackles the problem of how to address harm without incarcerating people.
A lot of people get stuck on abolition because they see it as a tearing down of a system, without understanding what new structures we’d need to build in its place. These brilliant thinkers grapple with what a more humane and accountable process would look like.
I particularly recommend the chapter on the transformative justice approach to ending child sexual abuse.
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the punative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and center as real alternatives to today’s failed models of confinement and “correction.”
In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety…
I have a deep-set interest in and passion for human and civil rights, particularly children’s rights. I see the law, with which I have had a fascination since the age of 14, as the primary vehicle for advancing those rights. My research on the law has always been on my own, and apart from several legally themed high school and university courses, I am a layman in this field. Nonetheless, I have extensively studied law privately for many years, with a particular focus on how it affects relations among people, including those between children and adults. Activism for social change is one of my primary motivators in life, my main purpose and direction, and my reason for being.
I liked that this book was specifically aimed at the Canadian market. It shows compassion for children, framing their rights as an important value and their advancement as a valid goal for Canadian society.
I am pleased that, unlike many others, the authors show some agreement with the premise that children should be able to have choices and participate in the decisions that affect their lives. I think this is a perspective that is lacking in many publications on the subject of children’s rights, which often focus more on the protectionist aspect of the issue than on the autonomy aspects.
More than a quarter of a century has passed since Canada promised to recognize and respect the rights of children under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ratification of the Convention cannot, however, guarantee that everyone will abandon proprietary notions about children, or that all children will be free to enjoy the substance of their rights in every social and institutional context in which they find themselves, including - and perhaps especially - within families. This disconnect remains one of the most important challenges to the recognition of children's rights in Canada.
Although I was raised without a religion, for more than half my life I’ve been involved in meditation and yogic communities. I have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly
If you are a Gen Xer like me and you wax nostalgia about the freedom of the mothers of your childhood vs. the shackles of parenting in the early twenty-first century as I have, Kim Brooks’ book is for you. Kim made the most grievous error a parent can make today: she left her four-year-old in her minivan in the parking lot of a rural Target so she could quickly grab an item. Though her child was fine, someone called the police. This event sent Kim down a rabbit hole to find out: is the American childhood as dangerous as people think? Her remarkable, thought-provoking book argues that childhood is remarkably safe, children should be exploring their environs, and some form of free-range parenting for many parents and kids should be the norm rather than the exception. This has been my philosophy since having children, and I was happy to…
One cool spring morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year-old son in the car while she ran into a store. What happened would consume the next several years of her life and ultimately motivated her to begin writing about the broader subject of parenthood and fear. In Small Animals, Brooks asks, Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? To be a parent is to be afraid. And yet, the objects and intensity of our fear vary based on culture, temperament, and the historical moment in which we…
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…
As a social historian, I have helped to direct scholarly attention to the history of family life and helped to create the field of history of children. I'm the editor of a pioneering three-volume encyclopedia on the history of children and the author of six books and editor of three others based on extensive research about children’s experiences in the United States and the Western world. I've also been widely interviewed on the subject. The End of American Childhood brings this research experience and broad expertise in the field to a subject of urgent interest to today’s parents who want to understand how their own views about children and their child-rearing perspectives are grounded historically.
How we treat children has a political dimension and is related to policies toward children.
A Right to Childhood discusses the first and only time that the United States created a federal agency to investigate and help direct child life. Lindenmeyer traces the origins of the Children’s Bureau to the fierce efforts of reform-minded women, and considers the agency’s attempts to improve the welfare of all children, including the children of the poor and foreign.
Starting with concerns about very high rates of infant mortality in the United States, the bureau moved on to study and inform mothers about children’s health, nutrition, and development, and issued a widely- distributed and influential guide to child rearing to mothers across the country.
For me, the experience of the Children’s Bureau provides an important lesson about how policies can be created and their political vulnerabilities.
Warring factions in the United States like to use children as weapons for their political agendas as Americans try to determine the role--if any--of the federal government in the lives of children. But what is the history of child welfare policy in the United States? What can we learn from the efforts to found the U.S. Children's bureau in 1903 and its eventual dismemberment in 1946? This is the first history of the Children's Bureau and the first in-depth examination of federal child welfare policy from the perspective of that agency. Its goal was to promote "a right to childhood,"…
I’m an Associate Professor in the University of Alabama’s Department of Philosophy. I worked as an FBI Special Agent before making the natural transition to academic philosophy. Being a professor was always a close second to Quantico, but that scene in Point Break in which Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze fight Anthony Kiedis on the beach made it seem like the FBI would be more fun than academia. In my current position as a professor at the University of Alabama, I teach in my department’s Jurisprudence Specialization. My primary research interests are at the intersection of philosophy of law, political philosophy, and criminal justice. I’ve written three books on policing.
I love this book because it provides a broad, philosophical backdrop for questions about policing.
We often hear policy recommendations regarding how to improve the plight of the urban poor, but Shelby argues that the central problem is more about the state’s failure to adhere to basic principles of justice. Rampant criminality in impoverished communities can thus be construed as a response to systematic injustice.
This book is a fascinating study of the ways that injustice can limit the range of rational life choices.
Winner of the Spitz Prize, Conference for the Study of Political Thought Winner of the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award
Why do American ghettos persist? Scholars and commentators often identify some factor-such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime-as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to "fix" ghettos or "help" their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice.
"Provocative...[Shelby] doesn't lay out a jobs program or a housing initiative. Indeed, as he freely…
I have a youthful spirit, but an old soul. Perhaps, that’s why I love African American history and gravitated to Black Studies as my undergraduate degree. My reverence for my ancestors sends me time and again to African-American historical fiction in an effort to connect with our past. Growing up, I was that kid who liked being around my elders and eavesdropping on grown-ups' conversations. Now, I listen to my ancestors as they guide my creativity. I’m an award-winning hybrid author writing contemporary and historical novels, and I value each. Still, it’s those historical characters and tales that snatch me by the hand and passionately urge me to do their bidding.
Part coming-of-age story, part slice of adult drama and misbehavior, this book impressed itself on my memory with its deceptive sweetness and heart-wrenching likability. It touches on teenaged pregnancy while examining infidelity stemming from a faulty marriage between a likable man and a bitter woman. I loved its honest examination of problematic, complex relationships—husband to wife, and child to adult. It is beautifully drawn, complex, and definitely on my "Books I can Re-Read Endlessly” list.
Part coming-of-age story and part slice of life, this is a literary novel about African-Americans in the rural South.
Set in rural Virginia during 1948, Miss Ophelia is a remarkable debut novel that explores the issues of abortion, illegitimacy, adultery, and skin color. Belly Anderson now in the autumn of her life, reminisces about the last summer of her childhood. A strong-willed and free-spirited eleven-year-old, she reluctantly leaves her home in rural Pharaoh and goes to Jamison to help her mean Aunt Rachel recover from surgery. Belly has two reasons for deciding to go to Jamison: She's left alone when…
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…
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…
