Welcome to the 35^th installment of Books (and more) by Friends

In 1975, Gary Tyler, a Black seventeen-year-old, became the youngest person on death row in the US. A year earlier, he was wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury of killing a white teenager. A 40-year campaign against this “legal lynching” led to Gary’s release in 2016, Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance and Hope in Angola Prison, by Gary Tyler with Ellen Bravo, tells the full story.   

Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South, by Walden Bello, takes the reader from street battles in Salvador Allende’s Chile to the deepest recesses of the World Bank’s document vaults, the din of Seattle’s anti-globalization protests, clandestine meetings with Hamas and Hezbollah, and inside the long struggle against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.

Understanding Palestine and Israel, a new book by Phyllis Bennis, explains the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict from the late nineteenth century to the current genocide underway in Gaza and the West Bank enabled by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

In stunning full color and accessible text, the graphic adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ award-winning volume, Indigenous People’s History of the United States, is now available. This volume is by By Paul Peart-Smith and Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, edited by Paul Buhle with contributions by Dylan Davis;

African Americans and a New History of the USA, by Gerald Horne, offers a deep analytic dive into the project of settler colonialism and enslavement of Africans that shaped the USA. The volume explains why this has necessitated internationalism as a strategic objective for Black Liberation and working-class advance, 

We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, by Eric Blanc, is a riveting account of labor’s bottom-up resurgence. Through digital tools and ambitious campaigns, young worker leaders are turning the labor movement back into a movement – and they’re winning.

An anti-immigrant crusade is central to the agenda of the MAGA bloc’s drive toward authoritarian rule. Yet the border regimes of imperialist states have long brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, edited by Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, and Coline Schupfer exposes the new technologies used by repressive regimes as means of surveillance, control, and violence.

The Ball Dreams of the Sky, an imaginative book of autobiographical poems by Henry Schipper, “translates life – all nine innings – into the language and metaphor of baseball. Everything from childhood trauma to early stardom, love, sex, creativity, meditation, midlife crisis, God, and more is batted around, lofted high, and tenderly caught like a ball in a glove.”

At age seventy-six, an x-ray inadvertently revealed that Jim Russell had lung cancer. Rejecting passivity, Jim educated himself about conventional and alternative approaches and designed his own extensive recovery program. For the full story, check out his book, Recovering from Serious Illness Late in Life.

The Milwaukee Silk Screen Collective conducted a two-year burst of radical poster-making in the late 1970s. You can download a full-color, free PDF of their creative output, from Free Leonard Peltier to Puerto Rico Libre – at this link.

Longtime union organizer Gene Bruskin is also a poet, songwriter, and playwright; since 2016 he has created and staged three musicals especially appealing to working-class militants and radical activists. You can find out more about these – and how to stage them for your organization – at Working People Deserve Bread and Roses – and Musicals or at the sites for each production: Pray for the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls and Mutiny, The Moment Was Now (a gathering during the Reconstruction era), and The Return of John Brown.

Three films produced by Donny Goldmacher relevant to today’s battles are available on Kanopy:  Heist – Who Stole the American Dream (a documentary tracing decades of the corporate offensive against the US populace); The Long Shadow (a candid  examination of anti-Black racism and the legacy of slavery), and Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House (a documentary about two of the funniest and most outrageous queer activists you’ll ever see).

Watch, read, and resist!