Welcome to the 31^st installment of Books (and more) by Friends.

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Dr. Vicki Alexander held nothing back in her memoir, Red Roots: My Life’s Journey Grounded in Revolutionary Struggle. The volume covers her life as a physician, a political activist, and a mom from her early years as the child of Black revolutionaries through her work in the Third World Women’s Alliance and as Director of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health for the City of Berkeley to her founding Healthy Black Families and much more.

The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane, a new documentary by Maureen Gosling, premieres at the Mill Valley Film Festival October 10 and will be available for streaming a week later. “For decades Barbara Dane lent her stellar singing voice to social-justice movements, garnering an impressive FBI file along the way. Deeply respected by fellow luminaries in folk, blues, and jazz, Dane built a far-reaching legacy with music, activism, and love.”

In Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, Jen Soriano brings to light the lingering impacts of transgenerational trauma. She traverses centuries and continents, weaving together memory and history, sociology and personal stories, neuroscience and public health, in this “searing memoir in essays.”

Clarence Lusane’s new book is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy. The author “writes from a basic premise: Racist historical narratives and pervasive social inequities are inextricably linked… Taking up the debate over the future of the twenty-dollar bill, Lusane uses the question of Harriet Tubman vs. Andrew Jackson to view the current state of our nation’s ongoing reckoning with the legacies of slavery and foundational white supremacy.”

The University of California, Berkeley is admired worldwide as a bastion of innovation and a hub for progressive thought. Far less known are the university’s roots in plunder, warfare, and the promotion of white supremacy. Check out Tony Platt’s new book, The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley to find out how central these sins are to Cal’s history.

In Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism, author Michael Zweig lays bare the underlying connections among today’s social justice movements, offering specific examples from U.S. history from the first settlement of the New World to the current day.

A resurgence of labor activism is one of the social movements at the forefront of challenging capitalist inequities. You Deserve a Tech Union, by Ethan Marcotte, is a valuable tool explaining the ways unionization benefits workers and the entire society. It includes interviews with tech workers who have experience in organizing unions and fighting for workers’ rights.

Inspired by recent true events including the murder of George Floyd, the stories in Witnesses for the Dead are set in motion by the act of witnessing. Each character grapples with what to do after witnessing a crime – take action or retreat into the shadows. And their lives are indelibly changed. Edited by Gary Phillips and Gar Anthony Haywood; Phillips’ knockout contribution to the collection confronts police corruption in “Spiders and Fly.” All proceeds from the volume go to the Alliance for Safe Traffic Stops.

Henry Kissinger is in the news again. For an in-depth history of one of the carnages he inflicted on the world – and one where his schemes suffered a humiliating defeat – check out Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia by Carolyn Eisenberg. The volume includes substantial, original interviews with Vietnamese participants in the war.

A new edition of Victor Wallis’ comprehensive introduction to eco-socialism is now available. Featuring a chapter-length epilogue and a new preface, Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism shows how a class-based analysis of technology and society can reshape our relationship with the natural environment.

Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, by Dan Berger, “brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom.” In centering the life stories of Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons this volume shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.

Amir Amirani’s documentary film history of the “second superpower” mass demonstration against the impending Iraq War in February 2003 is again showing at various venues across the country. Keep your eyes open for announcements of when We Are Many comes to your area or watch it on YouTube.

When longtime organizer Eddie Wong was in his twenties back in the 1970s, he attended UCLA film school in the Ethnocommunications program. He helped found Visual Communications and produced documentary films. His documentary, Pieces of a Dream – “A lyrical, expressive film history of Asian Pacific Americans on the Sacramento River” – has now been selected for restoration by the National Film Preservation Foundation.  You can watch it here.

If you are in the Bay Area, check out the world premiere of Aimie Suzara’s new play, Tiny Fires: Scavengers at the Edge of the World October 19-29. Characters Sugarpie and Trixie live as scavengers at the edge of a landfill in the Philippines… until someone arrives to move the action and lead to an exploration of the nature of resilience, adventure, chosen family, and the importance of following your dreams.

31 Hummingbird: A suite of poems is the debut collection by Chicana poet Aideed Medina. It is an invitation to risk flying on the wings of feathered lightning. Up, down, across, forward, backward, fluttering like thunder and lightning. The art in this chapbook is by Arnoldo Garcia.

As a community print center of diversity and cultural ferment, Mission Gráfica has produced challenging, aesthetically outstanding artwork of social and political relevance from 1982 to the present. Over one hundred full-color screenprints were selected from thousands produced by the many artists who passed through the studio for the new volume Mission Grafica: Reflecting a Community in Print. Works by numerous artists fill the book, including images by the four principal artists who have been involved in Gráfica for decades: Jos Sances, René Castro, Juan R. Fuentes and Calixto Robles. Art Hazelwood authored the text and the team that produced the volume included Juan R. Fuentes and Michelle Mouton.