Daniel's Staff Picks

Here are some books that staff member Daniel enjoyed reading. Maybe you will too!

Showing 1 - 20 of 20  There are a total of 106 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "Airplane mode"
Star rating for Airplane mode
Description:
"The color of one's skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, this ... debut parses who gets to...
Book cover for "Beastie Boys book"
Star rating for Beastie Boys book
Description:
"A panoramic experience that tells the story of Beastie Boys ... by band members ADROCK and Mike D"--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The Beatles"
Star rating for The Beatles
Series:
All these years volume 1.
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:

Tune In is the first volume of All These Years—a highly-anticipated, groundbreaking biographical trilogy by the world's leading Beatles historian. Mark Lewisohn uses his unprecedented archival access and hundreds of new interviews to construct the full story of the lives and work of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr.
Ten years in the making, Tune In takes the Beatles from before their childhoods

...
Book cover for "Becoming abolitionists"
Star rating for Becoming abolitionists
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems...
Book cover for "The color of law"
Star rating for The color of law
Average Rating:
4.8 stars
Description:
Rothstein examines the idea "that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, [he argues] that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day"--Amazon.com....
Book cover for "Down girl"
Star rating for Down girl
Author:
Description:
In this "analysis of what misogyny really is, how it works, its purpose, and how to fight it, the philosopher Kate Manne argues that modern society's failure to recognize women's full humanity and autonomy is not actually the problem. She argues instead that it is women's manifestations of human capacities--autonomy, agency, political engagement--is what engenders misogynist hostility"--
Book cover for "The Empire of Necessity"
Star rating for The Empire of Necessity
Book cover for "Forest of noise"
Star rating for Forest of noise
Description:
"Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one...
Book cover for "How to do nothing"
Star rating for How to do nothing
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as...doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process"--
Book cover for "I hope we choose love"
Star rating for I hope we choose love
Description:
"What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's...
Book cover for "A little devil in America"
Star rating for A little devil in America
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of black performance, in this moment when black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project,...
Book cover for "The making of the atomic bomb"
Star rating for The making of the atomic bomb
Series:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Book cover for "The message"
Star rating for The message
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic 'Politics and the English Language,' but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories--our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking--expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern...
Book cover for "Promises of gold ="
Star rating for Promises of gold =
Description:
A "collection of poems addressing how every kind of love--self, brotherly, romantic, familial, cultural--is birthed, shaped, and complicated by the invisible forces of gender, capitalism, religion, migration, and so on. Written in English and combined with a Spanish translation by poet David Ruano, [the book] explores many forms of love and how 'a promise made isn't always a promise kept,' as Olivarez grapples with the contradictions of the American...
Book cover for "A short history of trans misogyny"
Star rating for A short history of trans misogyny
Description:
"Shows why it matters to understand trans misogyny as a specific form of violence with a documentable history"--
Book cover for "They can't kill us until they kill us"
Star rating for They can't kill us until they kill us
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others--along with original, previously unreleased...
Book cover for "The warmth of other suns"
Star rating for The warmth of other suns
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
Book cover for "We were once a family"
Star rating for We were once a family
Description:
"The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children--and a searing indictment of the American foster care system"--
Book cover for "When crack was king"
Star rating for When crack was king
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey's exacting work exposes the undeniable links between the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement and the consequences we live with today-a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality. When...
Book cover for "White Negroes"
Star rating for White Negroes
Description:
"This book provides a cultural, political, and social survey through the most American of pastimes that continues to thrive today. With narrative, accessible criticism, research, and popular cultural touchstones we can all recognize, I'd like to introduce readers to the black presence that holds up daily life as they know it. It is a crucial account of the people, stories, and culture that create the hilarious, crazy wonder that is life in the 21st...