Portside

These two books are helpful background sources for the issues involved in today's protests for black lives. Although each is a few years old, they are both worth a second look.

Bakari Sellers is one of the most promising activist political leaders in Southern, and perhaps national politics. "“I’ve geared my life towards understanding who I am and fighting against systemic oppression and injustices,” he says.

With the mass outcry over the cop murders of George Floyd and so many other African Americans, it's worth reprising the review of a key 2017 book that sees even beyond defunding police to challenging the actual role of law enforcement in society.

In the wake of our current upsurge against racism in policing and in our society generally, this book, published late last year, has emerged as a top Amazon bestseller.

In this review from five years ago, a retired Seattle Police Department official writes about a book that addresses some of the problems of U.S. policing as an institution. Both the strengths and weaknesses of this review are revelatory.

The U.S is ostensibly a democracy, yet past presidential elections, most recently in 2016, saw the loser of the popular vote elected. Two authors look at the convoluted Electoral College system, singular among advanced nations, and propose remedies.

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, radical psychologists and psychoanalysts sought to transform their profession. This book shows how those efforts intersected with the radical cultural and political movements of the day.

The world economy, to the degree it still works at all, serves to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The author of the book under review does an economic deep dive into ways that can reverse that antidemocratic equation.

Journalist Lawrence Wright brings his considerable skills to bear in this novel about a pandemic, written before our current crisis erupted.

A portrait of the exploitative, homicidal racial dynamics lying at the nation’s core, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis.