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Book cover for "Assata"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur, a k a JoAnne Chesimard, lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infilitrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four...
Book cover for "Meditations"
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2.5 stars
Description:
"Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the sixteenth emperor of Rome -- and by far the most powerful and wealthy man in the world. Yet he was also an intensely private person, with a rich interior life and deep reservoirs of personal insight. He collected his thoughts in notebooks, gems which have come to be called his Meditations. Never intended for publication, the work survived his death and has proved an inexhaustible source of wisdom and one of the most...
Book cover for "The year of magical thinking"
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4.6 stars
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""Life changes fast. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly...
Book cover for "The five"
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Average Rating:
4.3 stars
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Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and of the Goodreads Choice Award for History & Biography
The award-winning, best-selling book that changes the narrative of the "Ripper" murders forever

Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Catherine, and Mary Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from some of London's wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods, from the factory towns of middle England,...
Book cover for "Midnight in Chernobyl"
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Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
In the thirty years since a reactor at the Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl has become shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. Drawing on interviews, letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from...
Book cover for "Destiny disrupted"
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Average Rating:
4 stars
Book cover for "Know my name"
Star rating for Know my name
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral--viewed by almost eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law...
Book cover for "Braiding sweetgrass"
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Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders,...
Book cover for "I shall not hate"
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Book cover for "I'm glad my mom died"
Star rating for I'm glad my mom died
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor -- including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother -- and how she retook control of her life.
Book cover for "Having and being had"
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Average Rating:
3 stars
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"Having just purchased her first home, the author embarks on a self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The essays in this volume offer an interrogation of work, leisure, and the lived experience of capitalism"--
Book cover for "The shock doctrine"
Star rating for The shock doctrine
Average Rating:
3.7 stars
Description:
Journalist Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed remarkably similar events: people still reeling were hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to corporate makeovers. This book retells the story of Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution. In contrast to the myth of...
Book cover for "Viral justice"
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"Long before the pandemic, Ruha Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. But the twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Part memoir, part manifesto, Viral Justice is a sweeping and deeply personal exploration of how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Vividly recounting...
Book cover for "Brutalities"
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A searing, vivid memoir that investigates the dynamics of violence, power, desire, and a body pushed to the brink. Quarantined in a southwestern desert city in the midst of her high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines felt her life narrow around her growing body, compelling her to reckon with the violence entangled in its history. She was a professional dominatrix in New York City, a homestead farmer in a brutal relationship, a welder on a high-rise building...
Book cover for "The great displacement"
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"The untold story of climate migration-the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future"--
Book cover for "Doppelganger"
Star rating for Doppelganger
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self -- a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience -- she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she...
Book cover for "Still life with bones"
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"An anthropologist working with forensic teams and victims' families to investigate crimes against humanity in Latin America explores what science can tell us about the lives of the dead in this haunting account of grief, the power of ritual, and a quest for justice. "Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration-of building something new with the pile of broken mirrors that is loss and...
Book cover for "How far the light reaches"
Star rating for How far the light reaches
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Sabrina Imbler has always been drawn to the mystery of life in the sea, and particularly to creatures living in hostile or remote environments. Each essay in their debut collection profiles one such creature: the female octopus who starves herself while watching over her eggs, the Chinese sturgeon whose migration route has been decimated by pollution and dams, the terrifying Bobbitt worm (named after Lorena) and other uncanny creatures lurking in...
Book cover for "Men We Reaped: A Memoir"
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Average Rating:
4.3 stars
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The two-time National Book Award winner and author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a Black man in the rural South.
Book cover for "Heavy"
Star rating for Heavy
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about the physical manifestations of violence, grief, trauma, and abuse on his own body. He writes of his own eating disorder and gambling addiction as well as similar issues that run throughout his family. Through self-exploration, storytelling, and honest conversation with family and friends, Heavy seeks to bring what has been hidden into the light and to reckon with all of its myriad sources, from the most...