The 2021 year-end reading list
Short looks at the books I’ve pulled from my library shelves in a year both heartbreaking and galvanizing.
Short looks at the books I’ve pulled from my library shelves in a year both heartbreaking and galvanizing.
Heather McGhee writes of why we must address our social solidarity deficit.
Let’s celebrate National Poetry Month, the savior of the NY Public Library, and the extraordinary success of Covid-19 vaccines.
Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be An Antiracist” is a powerful reminder of our personal responsibilities in fighting racism.
This past week the nation reached an important inflection point in our 400-year-old history with race and racism. The horrific murder of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in Minneapolis after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while he was lying face down handcuffed on the street, touched off nationwide protests and confrontations with the police and the Trump administration. The photo showing Chauvin on Floyd’s neck while casually looking away, hand in his pocket, hit like a punch in the country’s collective gut. Pictures can both reflect and change history. The iconic May 1963 photographs of Bull Connor’s police dogs and officers with fire hoses attacking peaceful protesters in Birmingham depicted savage assaults that, in civil rights historian Taylor Branch’s words, “struck like lightning in the American mind.” The 1968 photos of sanitation workers, with their “I Am A Man” signs, remind us of why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Memphis on that fateful April day. While I have no idea if …
History shows the positive impact effective, empathetic leadership brings during times of upheaval.