Welcome to the 36^th installment of “Books by Friends”:

In Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War, Jeremy Varon tells the story of the movement to stop the War on Terror: “the greatest case of ‘we told you so’ in modern political history,” full of lessons for today’s movements against militarism and empire.

Gerald Horne’s new book, The Capital of Slavery: Washington, DC 1800-1865, is “a stirring and riveting challenge to the traditional understanding of antebellum U.S. history, which paints a heroic picture of class struggle by the enslaved and their numerous allies at home and abroad.

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries, by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman, recounts the history of the late 1960s/early 1970s League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Drawing on more than forty hours of interviews with former members, the authors cover the history of the automotive industry in Detroit, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and the wildcat strike that sparked the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). 

None of Us Is Free Until All of Us Are Free is a collection of “new perspectives on global solidarity edited by William Minter in collaboration with Imani Countess. “Contributors to the volume “invite us to take grassroots democracy seriously, from encampments on university campuses in the USA to uprisings (intifada) against oppressive regimes in Palestine and around the world.”

In Stitching Freedom, Gary Tyler, writing with Ellen Bravo, offers his gripping memoir of a wrongful conviction and life on death row in Angola prison, showing how  incarcerated people care for, protect, mentor, and teach each other.

How do social movements arise, wield power, and bring about meaningful change? Linda Gordon tackles these questions in Seven Social Movements that Changed America. Case studies include the early twentieth century settlement house movement, the 1950s Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1970s farmworkers movement.

In Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism, Bill Robinson explains how “economic stagnation, runaway financial speculation, unprecedented social inequalities, political conflict, expanding wars, and the threat to the biosphere relate to one another and stem from the underlying contradictions of a global system spiraling out of control.” 

Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance is the latest graphic treatment of a hot-button political issue, edited by Paul Buhle. Covering “eleven stories of resistance from the rugged mountains of the Balkans to the urban landscapes of occupied Europe, this collection reminds us that the fight against fascism is far from over.”

Donna Wilmott, Linda Evans, and James Kilgore are among the thirty contributors to Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners. “This wide range of voices come together to embody what bell hooks called ‘a legacy of defiance.’ It is this legacy – of tirelessly struggling to right today’s wrongs and create a better tomorrow – that the prison system tries, yet fails, to extinguish.”

Digging Deeper into the Meaning of Palestine by Rod Such, a collection of several dozen book reviews over the last decade, is a kind of wide-ranging primer on the topic of Palestine and the Palestine liberation struggle,

Ricardo Levins Morales’ first book, The Land Knows the Way: Eco-Social Insights for Liberation, is “a collection of political medicines – gathered and gleaned from six decades of trickster art and activism, the long history of peoples’ movements, and the deep rhythms of our planet’s ecology.”

Free the People to Free the Money to Free the People is “an organize the rich anthology” edited by Mike Gast, Marian Moore, and Alex T. Tom. “For over fifty years, a growing movement has been quietly organizing wealthy people to redistribute their resources toward justice; this is the most comprehensive collection of stories to date from the front lines of this work.”

Mariana McDonald joins nine other poets defending Palestinian rights with a contribution to Verses Against the Siege. This collection is Alien Buddha Press’s  follow-up to the CEASEFIRE NOW!!! poetry series produced two years ago. Verses Against the Siege is dedicated to the Global Sumud Flotilla..

Clifton Ross and Dr. Cheryl Stevens are editors of the provocative volume Psychedelics in Recovery: Medicines, Sacraments and Catalysts. The book explores the potential roles of psychedelics in treating substance use disorders, framed around three concepts: as medical treatments, as spiritual sacraments, and as personal growth catalysts. You can get a free copy in PDF form by writing rapirbook@gmail.com.