By Beverly Daniel Tatum

Using real-life examples and a conversational tone, this sensitive and extensively researched book presents strong evidence that straight talking about our racial identities is crucial if we are serious about meaningful change.

By Solomon Northup

A memoir describing the life of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from Saratoga, N.Y., who was kidnapped in 1841 and forced into slavery in Louisiana for twelve years.

Became the movie: 12 Years a Slave.

By Steve Pressman

Based on the HBO documentary, a true story of personal courage and heroism follows one Jewish American couple as they risked their own lives to travel to Nazi-controlled Vienna and Berlin to rescue fifty Jewish children.

By Josh Neufeld

A.D. follows six ordinary people from the hours before Katrina struck to its horrific aftermath.

By Mark Twain

When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.

By Susan Jacoby
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“Dismayed by the average U.S. citizen's political and social apathy and the overall "crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think," Jacoby passionately argues that the nation's current cult of unreason has deadly and destructive consequences (the war in Iraq, for one) and traces the seeds of current anti-intellectualism (and its partner in crime, antirationalism) back to post-WWII society (Publishers Weekly).”

By Nicoli Nattrass

Examines conspiracy theories surrounding HIV and AIDS, focusing on two main widely believed falsehoods - that America manufactured AIDS to be a biological weapon and the belief that HIV is harmless and the true cause of AIDS is antiretroviral drugs.

By Judith Frank
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

When Daniel Rosen's twin brother and sister-in-law are killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, he and his husband Matthew are confronted with challenges that threaten their relationship as they try to adopt the couple's two children.

By Tiffany Jackson

Mary B. Addison killed a baby. Allegedly. She didn't say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: a white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine–year–old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it?

By Leah Franqui
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

A widow from India travels to California to learn the truth about what happened to the son who was declared dead shortly after he revealed his sexual orientation to their traditional family.

By James Basker

Published to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, this anthology charts America's long, heroic confrontation with its most poisonous evil.

By Jeanine Cummins
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian, Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk, Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

Selling two favorite books to an unexpectedly erudite drug-cartel boss, a bookstore manager is forced to flee Mexico in the wake of her journalist husband’s tell-all profile and finds her family among thousands of migrants seeking hope in America.

By America Ferrera

From an award—winning actress and political activist comes a vibrant and varied collection of first person accounts from prominent figures—including Lin–Manuel Miranda, Issa Rae, Kumail Nanjiani, Roxane Gay and many more—about the experience of growing up between cultures.

By Benjamin Nugent

An engaging study of the nerd in popular culture and throughout history discussed in such contexts as the rise of online gaming, the science fiction club, ethnicity, Asperger’s syndrome, autism, and high school and college debating.

By Ibi Zoboi

Separated from her detained mother after moving from Haiti to America, Fabiola struggles to navigate the home of her loud cousins and a new school on Detroit's gritty west side, where a surprising romance and a dangerous proposition challenge her ideas about freedom.

By Marcus Rediker

A scholarly account of the nineteenth-century slave ship rebellion presented from the perspectives of the slaves, discusses their fight for freedom within the context of the chain of resistance spanning the earliest slave revolts through the Civil Rights era.

By Helen E. Fisher

This revised edition includes the latest research on anthropology and internet-age relationships and examines the brain's role in love and courtship while making recommendations for returning to traditional patterns of romance.

By Deborah Gray White

This book challenges the myth of the Southern mammy and other myths and attempts a richer, more complex picture of the lives of black women in slavery. Drawing on historical evidence… the author examines slave women's daily life, occupations, family roles, and female networks.

By Stefan Kiesbye

Provides essays with varying opinions on social networking sites, discussing their effects on social skills, connection with bullying, and potential use by stalkers and sexual predators.

By Helen Zia

This book is about the transformation of Asian Americans from a few small, disconnected, and largely invisible ethnic groups into a self-identified racial group that is influencing every aspect of American society.

By Roxane Gay

A cultural examination of the ways in which the media influences self-perception, and discusses how society still needs to do better.

By Rosemary Gibson

Drawing on decades of experience in health care policy reform and economics, the authors provide a non-partisan analysis of President Obama's health care reform.

By Eyal Press

An exploration of what motivates individual acts of courage and conscience in dangerous circumstances.

By Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr.

Gathered in this book are the most recent insights into lives of African-Americans - slave and free - in the antebellum South from leading scholars in the fields of history, folklore, anthropology, material culture, and archaeology.

By Katherine Boo
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, April 9, 2013.  7:30 PM.

Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Non-Fiction
“Profiles everyday life in the settlement of Annawadi as experienced by a Muslim teen, an ambitious rural mother, and a young scrap metal thief, illuminating how their efforts to build better lives are challenged by religious, caste, and economic tensions (From the Publisher).”

By Atul Gawande

A prominent surgeon argues against modern medical practices that extend life at the expense of quality of life.

By Margaret Powell

Chronicles the experiences of a 1920s maid working in the great houses of England, detailing the disparate lives of the upper class and their servants, the class struggles inherent in the relationship, and daily life as a servant.

By Chuck Thompson
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

“Describes the author’s road trip investigation into the cultural divide of the United States during which he met possum-hunting conservatives and prayer warriors before concluding that both sides might benefit if the South seceded (From the Publisher).”

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

The author presents a history of racial discrimination in the United States and a narrative of his own personal experiences of contemporary race relations, offering possible resolutions for the future.

By Michael M. Lewis
Recommended By Alisa Fogel, Librarian-Programming

Shares insights into the recent economic crisis, citing such factors as expanded home ownership and risky derivative elections in the face of increasing shareholder demands, and profiles responsible parties in government, financial, and private sectors.

By Joyce Carol Oates

Remembering Minette Swift, the talented, assertive, 19-year-old African-American girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive, mostly white liberal arts college near Philadelphia who died under mysterious circumstances fifteen years earlier, Genna, her former roommate, begins an unofficial inquiry into her death. As she reconstructs their tumultuous freshman year at the college in race-torn 1960s Philadelphia, Genna is led also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous "radical-hippie-lawyer" of the 1960s.

By Sharon M. Draper

Piano–prodigy Isabella, eleven, whose black father and white mother struggle to share custody, never feels whole, especially as racial tensions affect her school, her parents both become engaged, and she and her stepbrother are stopped by police.

By Greg Campbell

An expose of international diamond smuggling operations considers the rebel campaigns linked to the Sierra Leone diamond mines and how the area and its people have been destroyed by the industry's policies.

By Attica Locke
Series Highway 59

Forced by duty to return to his racially divided East Texas hometown, an African–American Texas Ranger risks his job and reputation to investigate a highly charged double murder case involving a black Chicago lawyer and a local white woman.

By Jim Shepard
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“Aron, one of the children of the Warsaw Ghetto who smuggle and trade things through the “quarantine walls” to keep their people alive, is rescued by a Jewish-Polish doctor who instills within him the importance of revealing to the world the atrocities they have all suffered (From the Publisher).”

By Helen Andrews

In Boomers, essayist Helen Andrews addresses the Boomer legacy with scrupulous fairness and biting wit.

By Trevor Noah
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

The host of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah traces his wild coming of age during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed, offering insight into the farcical aspects of the political and social systems of today's world.

By Helen Oyeyemi

A reimagining of the Snow White story recast as a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity set in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s.

By Liz Murray
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Monday, September 9, 2013.  7 PM.

"The author offers an emotional account of her amazing journey from a 15-year-old living on the streets and eating garbage to her acceptance into Harvard, a feat that prompted a Lifetime movie and a successful motivational-speaking career (From the Publisher)."

*A 2011 Alex Award Winner

By Barbara Ehrenreich
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

“Americans are a "positive" people - cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told… (From the Publisher).”

By Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller
Recommended By Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions

A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.

By Edwidge Danticat
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“She has written a fierce, haunting book about exile and loss and family love, and how that love can survive distance and separation, loss and abandonment and somehow endure, undented and robust (New York Times Book Review).”

By Jacqueline Woodson

In vivid poems that reflect the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, an award-winning author shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and the South.

By Christopher Paul Curtis
Grade(s): 4+

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father—the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

By Hanif Kureishi

Karim's father becomes London's buddha of suburbia & draws his son into an overwhelming world of eccentric people & extravagant parties.

By Chuck Klosterman
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Explores the idea that today's mainstream beliefs about the world are fundamentally incorrect, drawing on original interviews with intellectuals and experts to consider how music, sports, literature, and other present–day conventions may be perceived in future centuries.

By Ronan Farrow

Both a spy thriller and a meticulous work of investigative journalism, Catch and Kill breaks devastating new stories about the rampant abuse of power and sheds far-reaching light on investigations that shook our culture.

By Leslie Marmon Silko
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Deeply scarred Tayo, a WWII veteran of mixed ancestry, returns to the Laguna Pueblo Reservation.

By Laurie Halse Anderson

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

By Jessica Alexander

An experienced humanitarian worker who has helped the refugees in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Darfur, and Haiti gives an insider’s view of the chaos and danger involved in such a pursuit, as well as what some workers do to deal with the stress.