Although I endorse Rothblatt's ideal of a sex-irrelevant society, I think he fails to fully comprehend the subordination by sex that females currently experience. And if he hadn't been so rich (like Jenner), he might not have voluntarily become a member of that sexed underclass. (I suspect his money has largely insulated him from the negative effects of being perceived as a woman.) That said, this 1995 book is a pioneering classic. (Though I think the subtitle should have been "A Manifesto on the Freedom from Gender" — not " A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender".)

This book is a favorite among many parents who can relate!

This book beautifully speaks to children who feel different or left out, and as we know, that's quite a common experience. It shows the courage it takes to share your story and the power of finding connection.

I admire how it encourages kids to embrace what makes them unique and see that their differences are what make them special.

This is Your Brain on Stereotypes takes a deep dive into not just our conscious prejudices but our unconscious biases as well as systemic bias and stereotypes.

It looks not only at how to recognize our biases, but also how to change them and what it will take to change society’s systemic racism. It uses research, statistics, and anecdotes and it may make us feel uncomfortable at times. That uncomfortable feeling is one of discovery—and it’s the first step toward making meaningful change through critical analysis.

“Nine robed figures dressed all in white,” begins this haunting story of the Ku Klux Klan arriving in the small town of Bumblebee, North Carolina. The year is 1932 and the town is, of course, segregated. Black and White. A line in the soil―just like the neighborhood street of my childhood in Springfield, Virginia that divided my Korean family from the white family who fought and failed to keep us from moving into our home. The reader will step into eleven-year-old Stella Mills' shoes and feel all her fear and anger over the injustices of her world that highlights voting rights. But young Stella harnesses her anger through words (much the way I did as a child) by creating a fantasy newspaper column called Stella Star’s Sentinel. Why didn’t I think of that? I only had my blue diary with a gold clasp. In Stella’s ‘newspaper’ she expresses how… show more.

This book is unique in the world of wrongful conviction books because it is written by a former prosecutor. Mark Godsey gives readers an inside view of how innocence often gives way to winning trial records and promotions based on successful prosecutions in the competitive world of prosecutions. 

Godsey tells this story from the perspective of not just a former prosecutor but also the current Director of one of the most successful innocence organizations in the world, where he has exonerated dozens of innocent people. The stories of his clients and his career transition are insightful and heartbreaking. 

A quirk of nature has caused some animals to evolve so that they think and communicate like humans but still look like animals (only bigger) than they were.

As they try to integrate into normal human society, they are met with prejudice to the point of genocide.

The slow, precise way this is done is disturbingly like the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 30s and has, even more disturbingly, many parallels in today’s world.

The story is fast-paced and entirely credible, even though the main characters are animals that talk and think like humans. I particularly liked the ending while, at the same time, wishing that it could have been different. But it fits the reality we live in.

This book says so much about the world we live in and the deterioration of the more decent side of our species as the world sinks into a right-wing… show more.

Teachable Monuments is an expensive book, but it is also a book useful for integrating the work of scholars with teachers, using monuments to examine and create new meanings from monument culture via curriculum and classroom activities. The book comes after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a seismic event in the United States and abroad which hastened the removals of many Confederate and Columbus monuments, as well as monuments in Europe and beyond.

Sometimes, a beautiful voice can be expressed through the spoken word rather than in song.

This is a lovely story about Amina, a twelve-year-old Pakistan American with perfect pitch. Amina’s best friend urges her to sign up for a solo, but Amina prefers to accompany on the piano.

I love that Hena Khan builds Amina’s acceptance of who she is! Uncle’s melodious reading of the Quran changes Amina’s attitude, and she and her brother agree to participate in a statewide Quran recitation competition.

But when their Islamic Center is vandalized, the community rallies, and Amina finds the courage to recite the opening verses at the competition.

It isn’t perfect, but what she wins is a new self-confidence to sing.

Thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and deeply humane, Expelling the Poor shows how poverty—and Irish poverty in particular—shaped American immigration policy.

Until the late nineteenth century, Hidetaka Hirota demonstrates, individual states and cities controlled their own borders. They regulated, taxed, excluded, and removed the Irish poor, thereby laying the groundwork for the national policy that emerged in the 1880s.

By examining the impact of nativist sentiment, Hirota reveals how policies directed at the Irish-born poor, alongside the exclusion of Chinese laborers, explain the origins of immigration policy in the United States.

A gripping account of a converso family--their ancestors had been Jewish but were forced to convert to Christianity—trying to survive in Spain during the 1492 Inquisition. This story most closely aligns with the thread of Jewish history underlying my book. It’s told by a young servant girl working for the family, who overcomes her firmly ingrained hatred of Jews and becomes a hero as she learns that what matters most is a person’s goodness, not the religious rituals they practice. It’s told with lavish detail that transports the reader to a dangerous time for anyone with Jewish blood in their ancestral line.