The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

 

A cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity, from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac—who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015.

The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero emissions. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can, and must, do to fend off disaster. This book is available in both written and audio formats.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation

 

by Linda Villarosa, 2022, 269 pages, hardback, e-book, and audiobook.

In this powerful, carefully researched book, journalist Linda Villarosa builds on her 2018 articles on mortality among Black mothers and infants to describe the significant health challenges faced by Black American simply because they are Black. She effectively combines articles from medical journals with personal accounts to paint  a convincing picture of how Black Americans “live sicker and die quicker” than their white counterparts, no matter their income or education.

She outlines three different reasons for the much poorer health outcomes among Black people:

·       Bias in the health care system leading to different treatment of Black and White patients

·       Environmental injustice which disproportionately exposes Black communities to pollution from highways, toxic waste dumps, and lead pipes and so on

·       “Weathering”—the chronic stress resulting from constantly coping with racism that can result in premature aging and poor health outcomes. 

She also asks the important question: “What if Black people are simply the canaries in the coal mine?” Does sustained discrimination cause harm to anyone, no matter their race? To help answer this question, she visits West Virginia, one of the whitest (93% white) and poorest states, with the lowest life expectancy in the nation.  She found that West Virginia is plagued by some of the same diseases that shorten the lives of Black Americans with poor physical and mental health.

Villarosa documents unending examples of social racism, inbred bias, and general neglect, but somehow remains hopeful for change, introducing individuals and programs that are making positive differences. Her compelling account clearly reveals that the American medical system must be reformed. A convincing must-read.

 

Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland

 

by Nancy Schwartzman with Nora Zelevansky, 2022, 283 pages, hardback, e-book, and audiobook.  A documentary version was released in 2018.

In this compelling account, filmmaker Schwartzman focuses on an August 2012 high school party where several members of the Steubenville football team sexually assaulted an unconscious (drunk and possibly drugged) teenage girl, filmed the assault on their phones and live-tweeted about it.

Schwartzman spent three years in the town documenting the case and its consequences. She interviewed everyone involved, read police reports and trial transcripts, and viewed social media posts. She explored the role high school football played in this struggling rust belt town.

She clearly shows that rape culture (“boys will be boys), victim blaming, and institutional complicity are the rule rather than the exception in too many places. She believes that there has been progress in the ten years since the assault, but we still have far to go. “We have a chance to learn from our mistakes, call in a diversity of voices, and protect future generations. But first we have to be willing to take a hard look at the unconscious, entrenched behaviors that allow this type of culture to flourish.” A well-documented account of a crime without punishment as violence against women continues.

A related, excellent book is She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey.

City of Refugees: The Story of Three Newcomers Who Breathed Life into a Dying American Town

 by Susan Hartman, 2022, 256 pages, hardback, e-book, and audiobook

In this engaging book, journalist Susan Hartman followed three refugee families living in Utica, New York for eight years.  She shows how the influx of refugees into Utica has helped revive this struggling upstate old manufacturing city.

In the 1970’s, the factories in Utica downsized then closed. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Utica’s population, which was 100,000 in 1960, dropped to 60,000 in 2000. The city’s economic decline led to gang violence, drug dealing, and frequent arson, but left behind plentiful and inexpensive housing.

 

The inexpensive housing provided homes for the refugee families, including the three Hartman profiled in this book:

·         Mersiha Omeragic, a refugee from Bosnia, runs a bakery business from her home, teaches English at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, and recently opened a café/bakery downtown.

·         Sadia, a Somali Bantu teen, arrived with her family from a Kenyan refugee camp. She struggles with her mother about Americanizing too fast and  tries to cope with the demands of an American high school.

·         Ali, an Iraqi with traumatic war experiences, returns to Iraq as a translator for the American army to provide for his family in Utica.

 

As their lives changed, so did the city of Utica. The population of the city is now 65,000 people, a quarter of which are refugees and their families. Downtown has been revitalized, including construction of a big new hospital and new apartment buildings. People are moving into the city, instead of moving out.

 

In this immersive study, Hartman illuminates the humanity of these outsiders, while demonstrating the crucial role immigrants play in the economy and society of America.

 

Last Summer on State Street

 by Toya Wolfe, 2022, 212 pages, hardback, e-book, audiobook.

In this moving autobiographical novel, Toya Wolfe tells the story of 12-year-old Fe Fe (Felicia) and her friends Precious, Stacia, and Tonya during the summer of 1999. The Chicago Housing Authority is tearing down  the Robert Taylor Homes, the enormous public housing project where she lives with her mother and her older brother Meechie. Everyone will have to find a new place to live.

At the beginning of the novel, Fe Fe and her friends are still able to be children, double-dutching  (jumping rope) and spending time together. As destruction of their building approaches, tensions, and violence rise. It becomes impossible to ignore the poverty, drugs, police brutality, and gang warfare. Fe Fe must deal with  harsh realities around her--Meechie's unsuccessful struggle to resist gang life, Stacia's gang loyalty, and Tonya's mother's crack addiction. This is the story of how the children who live in these housing projects are forced to become adults too soon. As Fe Fe puts it, “Black kids don’t get the luxury of appearing childlike and innocent, that from the moment we are born, some people start a clock on how long it’ll take the boys to commit a crime, the girls to seduce.”

While Wolfe, who grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, depicts the sadness of the characters’ lives, she also shows the power of love, faith, and close relationships to help some of them escape their grim world and build better lives.

WOMEN UNSILENCED: Our Refusal to Let Torturer-Traffickers Win

by Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald

354 pages, Hardcover, Paperback,& Kindle.    Publication Date:  August 31,  2021

                        

A review by Judith Ainsworth, Zonta Club of Ottawa

WOMEN UNSILENCED explores the impact of unthinkable violence committed against women and girls through many perspectives—women’s recall of life-threatening ordeals of torture, human trafficking, organized crime, society’s failure to recognize and address such crimes, and close examinations of how justice, health, political and social systems perpetuate re-victimizing trauma. At times raw, painful and shocking, this book is an important resource for those who have survived such crimes; professionals who support those victimized by torturers and traffickers; police, legal professionals, criminologists, human rights activists, and educators alike. It reveals how healing and claiming one’s relationship with/to/for Self is possible.

 

Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald are retired public health nurses whose own experiences helped give voice and understanding to women who have been silenced. The book uses women’s storytelling to educate readers on the unimaginable layers of perpetrators’ modus operandi of violence, manipulation and deceit. They heard from other women who suffered torture when exploited in prostitution or pornographic violence. They defied social willingness to ignore that such violence existed by calling for non-State torture to be criminalised and they use their website www.nonstatetorture.org to promote global awareness.

 

Their ground-breaking work began in 1993, fifteen years before the United Nations Committee against Torture ventured to write, in 2008, that acts of torture committed by private individuals or groups are specific human rights violations. Back in 1993 they could find no literature on how to offer recovery care to women who survived such torture. They made it a goal to break this silence by detailing the intimacies of their recovery work journey offering care, hope and belief to women in WOMEN UNSILENCED.

 

They are often asked how two women—two nurses—who live in a little Canadian Nova Scotia town managed to achieve what they have. Their answer is simple: “We cared!”

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years that Changed American Women's Lives at Work

 by Gillian Thomas, 2016, 295 pages, paperback, e-book, audiobook

An illuminating study of landmark sex-discrimination cases waged in the wake of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which added three crucial words, "because of sex," to the employment discrimination section. This landmark piece of legislation for working women came at a time when job opportunities were few, career advancement was unheard of, and pregnancy and even marriage could bring about instantaneous unemployment.

 

Thomas, an employment discrimination lawyer, presents 10 cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court to illustrate the early efforts by working women to find some equality and justice in the workplace. These efforts included being able to be hired in jobs once the exclusive domain of men, being protected from sexual harassment, and protected from discrimination for pregnancy

 

In the years since, women have gone on to comprise almost half the country's work force while rising to the highest ranks in every profession. Yet those achievements weren't attained with the mere stroke of a pen. There were real women behind these accomplishments, women who had to sue for the freedoms that Title VII purported to have granted.

 

The author merges the personal stories with the legal intricacies of the litigation and crafts a moving and informative account of a struggle for equality that remains incomplete.