This library contains a list of books that I think positively add to the public discourse. They are chosen for their lucidity, originality, depth of material, trustworthiness, and breadth of sourcing. Some are just works of art and literature that speak to universal themes in our lives – or to our current socio-political climate. I tried not to be too skewed in the material but, as Rachel Maddow likes to quote, “Truth has a liberal bias.” The overarching theme of the texts is simply to enrich your worldview and give you the tools to confront issues that are uncomfortable and different. In short, I want to to empower you with knowledge, even if it means shaking up your system.

This is about educating yourself so you can be a stronger part of the resistance. Read. Learn. Fight back.

Remember to check your local and used bookstores, not just online retailers! Used book stores are absolutely incredible and have unbelievable deals that also allow you to support your local businesses. Don’t forget about your library, too.

Indigenous Issues

• King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
• Frazier, Ian. On the Rez.
• Deer, Sarah. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America.
• Adams, Mikaela. Who Belongs?: Race, Resources, and Tribal Citizenship in the Native South.
• Buscombe, Edward. ‘Injuns!’: Native Americans in the Movies.
• Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
• Short, John Rennie. Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World.
• Richter, Daniel. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America.
• Page, Jake. In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000-Year History of American Indians.
• Churchill, Wade. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas: 1492 to the Present.
• Deloria, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.
• Hill, Gord. The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book.
• Treuer, David. Rez Life.
• Drury, Bob. The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend.
• Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation.
• Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

American Politics and History

• Coll, Steve. Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.
• Hayes, Chris. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy.
• Hayes, Chris. A Colony in a Nation. 
• Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature.
• Power, Samantha. A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
• Klein, Naomi. No Logo.
• Finkel, David. Thank You For Your Service.
• Wells, Ida B. The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. 
• White, Micah. The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution.
• Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life.
• Turse, Nick. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
• Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.
• Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 
• Jaffe, Sarah. Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.
• Krakauer, Jon. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.
• Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
• Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
• Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.
• Marlantes, Karl. What It Is Like to Go to War.
• Holon, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia.
• Krakauer, Jon. Under the Banner of Heaven.
• Grim, Ryan. This is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.
• Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.
• Okrent, Daniel. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.
• Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.
• Schlosser, Eric. Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.
• LeDuff, Charlie. Detroit: An American Autopsy.
• Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
• Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.
• Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.
• Dionne, E.J. Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent.
• Greenwald, Glenn. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
• Davis, William C. Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America.
• Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton.
• Safina, Carl. A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout.

Latin American Politics and History

• Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
• Stephen, Lynn. Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below.
• Blouet, Olywn M. The Contemporary Caribbean: History, Life, and Culture Since 1945.
• Weschler, Lawrence. A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers.
• Schlesinger, Stephen and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.
• Gomez-Barris, Macarena. Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile.
• Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898.
• Conant, Jeff. A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency.
• Fehrenbach, T.R. Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico.
• Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation.
• Lomnitz, Claudio. Death and the Idea of Mexico.
• Chasteen, John Charles. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America.
• Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America: 1800-2000.
• Brown, Matthew. From Frontiers to Football: An Alternative History of Latin America since 1800.

Queer/Sexuality Studies

• Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation.
• Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America.
• Gessen, Masha. Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories.
• Bronski, Michael. A Queer History of the United States.
• Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.
• Garber, Marjorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.
• Lanser, Susan. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830.
• Rodriguez, Juana Maria. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings.
• Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America.
• Erickson-Schroth, Laura. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community.
• Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
• van Driel, Mels. With the Hand: A Cultural History of Masturbation.
• Faderman, Lillian. Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present.
• Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.
• Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality & Civilization.
• Mogul, Joey and Andrea Ritchie and Kay Whitlock. Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.
• Russell, Diana. Dangerous Relationships: Pornography, Misogyny and Rape.
• Miller, Tim and Jill Dolan. Theatre and Sexuality.
• Whatley, Mariamne and Elissa Henken. Did You Hear About the Girl Who…?: Contemporary Legends, Folklore, and Human Sexuality.
• Faderman, Lillian. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle.
• Woodard, Vincent. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture.
• Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
• Drenth, Jelto. The Origin of the World: Science and Fiction of the Vagina.

Women, Feminist, and Racial Studies

• Harris-Perry, Melissa. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.
• Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class.
• Radner, Joan. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture.
• Robinson, Eugene. Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America.
• Florey, Kenneth. Women’s Suffrage Memorabilia: An Illustrated Historical Study.
• McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.
• Gay, Roxane. Bad Feminist.
• Gay, Roxane. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture.
• Ward, Jesmyn. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race.
• Chang, Jeff. We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation.
• Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric.
• Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia.
• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.
• Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.
• Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race.
• Miles, Rosalind. Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women’s History of the World.
• Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists.
• White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.
• Leeds, Maxine. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race.

Middle Eastern, African, and Asian Politics and History

• Engel, Richard. And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East.
• Engel, Richard. A Fist in the Hornet’s Nest: On the Ground In Baghdad Before, During & After the War.
• Schiff, Stacy. Cleopatra: A Life.
• Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.
• Hastings, Michael. The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.
• Harms, Gregory and Todd Ferry. The Palestine-Israel Conflict.
• Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect.
• Gilman, Lisa. My Music, My War: The Listening Habits of U.S. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Murakami, Haruki. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.
• Johnson, Rob. Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia since 1945.
• Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and and Heroism in Colonial Africa.
• Wilkinson, Toby. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt.
• Yiwu, Liao. The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up.
• Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence.
• Soufan, Ali. The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda.
• Hersey, John. Hiroshima.
• Burgis, Tom. The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth.
• Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
• Lee, Jonathan. Afghanistan: A History from 1260 to the Present Day.
• Fagan, Brian. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archeologists in Egypt.
• Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.
• Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent.

Science

• Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time.
• Fritze, Ronald. Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science, and Pseudo-religions.
• Bjornerud, Marcia. Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth.
• Sagan, Carl. Cosmos.
• Goldsmith, Barbara. Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie.
• Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.
• Brusatte, Steve. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.
• Gleick, James. Isaac Newton.
• Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
• Maddox, Brenda. Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA.
• Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100.
• Kroonenberg, Salomon. Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld.
• Grandin, Temple. Animals Make Us Human.
• Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us.
• Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times.
• Smoot, George. Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe.
• Biss, Eula. On Immunity.
• King, Barbara. How Animals Grieve.
• Solomon, Andrew. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.
• Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Literature and Literary Criticism

• Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale.
• Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go.
• Dr. Seuss. The Lorax.
• Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. The Thing Around Your Neck.
• Milton, John. Paradise Lost.
• Spiegelman, Art. Maus I & II.
• Shepard, Sam. Buried Child.
• Alderman, Naomi. The Power.
• McClanahan, Scott. Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place.
• Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems: 1966-1996.
• Morse, Deborah Denenholz. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture.
• Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome.
• Ortego, Julio. Transatlantic Translations: Dialogues in Latin American Literature.
• Mishima, Yukio. Confessions of a Mask.
• Gambara, Griselda. Information for Foreigners: Three Plays.
• Dorfman, Ariel. Death and the Maiden.
• Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home.
• Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits.
• Fischer, Steven Roger. A History of Writing.
• Basbanes, Nicholas. A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books.
• Anonymous. Beowulf.
• Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories.
• Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus.
• Shakespeare, William. Macbeth.
• Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
• Groff, Lauren. The Monsters of Templeton.
• Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen.
• Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta.
• Bolano, Roberto. Nazi Literature in the Americas.
• Camus, Albert. The Plague.
• Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.
• Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture.
• Morrison, Toni. Sula.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
• Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye.
• Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
• Vaughan, Brian K. and Pia Guerra. Y: The Last Man.
• Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle.

Russian Politics and History

• Gessen, Masha. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.
• Gessen, Masha. Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.
• Montefiore, Simon Sebag. The Romanovs: 1613-1918.
• Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History.
• Frazier, Ian. Travels in Siberia.
• Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.
• Judah, Tim. In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution.
• Smith, Douglas. Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy.
• Lincoln, W. Bruce. Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia.
• Politkovskaya, Anna. A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya.
• Politkovskaya, Anna. Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy.

Western/Eastern European Politics and History (Or, Miscellaneous)

• Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.
• Davidson, Peter. The Idea of North.
• Chomsky, Noam and Andre Vltchek. On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.
• Helm, Sarah. Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women.
• Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999.
• Fernandez-Armesto, Filipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492.
• Braudel, Fernand. Memory and the Mediterranean.
• Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich.
• De Hamel, Christopher. The Book: A History of the Bible.
• Dworkin, Anthony and Ray Gutman. Crimes of War.
• Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.
• Taylor, Becky. Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers.
• Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History.
• Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Photo: The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.