Welcome to the latest installment of Books by Friends:

In For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness, Yotam Marom “offers a brilliant, lyrical, clarion cry for a more honest, more strategic, more loving approach to progressive activism and movement building; a deep dive into the challenges that hold movements back.”

Gerald Horne’s latest is The Counter-Revolution of 1893: The Hawaii Coup and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism in the Asia-Pacific Basin. “In the 1890s, Euro-Americans across class lines, overthrew the monarchy – denounced as ‘Negroes’ – and established an apartheid regime.” 

Interested in how the mass mobilization for World War II catalyzed the political movements and conflicts of the postwar period? Then check out Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II, by Tej Nagaraja.

Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures, by  Maceo Martinet: “This book invites readers to rediscover and re-embody the truth that caring for ourselves and caring for the living Earth are one and the same.”

The Antinomies of Black Marxism: Critique of the Racial Capitalism Paradigm, edited by Bill Robinson and Salvador Rangel, “contests the now‑enormous influence of Cedric Robinson’s framework, bringing together leading scholars of Marxism to reassess the decisive question of race and Marxist thought and practice.”

Red Lives: Our Years in the U.S. Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1: Coming of Age in the Communist and Labor Movements, edited by Jay Schaffner and other friends, with contributions by many more: “The nearly fifty first-person testimonies bring to life a missing chapter in the history of US radicalism and demonstrate the influence of the post–World War II generation of Communists.”

Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter, by Beth Howard: “An Appalachian organizer’s excavation of the past, her own and her people’s, to spark a collective fight for a future where we all have what we need and deserve.”

As the cracks in U.S. society grow and our public institutions are strained to the breaking point, libraries remain places of places of curiosity, imagination, memory, and togetherness. Behind the Desk at the Main: A Librarian’s Memoir, by Dorothy Lazard reveals the pressures that library workers face – from economic crises to book bans – as they uphold these ideals.  

Boots Riley wrote the foreword, Jesse Strauss did the interviews and edited the volume. The result is Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley: “Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism.”

In Living with Strangers: Healing a Wounded Heart in a Distant Land Robin Rosenbluth tells her “hopeful and brave coming-of-age story of surviving a turbulent youth and going on to find a sense of belonging and a new lease on life in a semi-nomadic Kenyan community.”

In the forthcoming Waiting for the Wave, Kate Raphael taps the brains of Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams for the secret to building grassroots resistance movements with the grit and traction to prevail against increasingly grim odds. The interviews delve into four decades of in-the-weeds activism, internationalism, and radical feminism.

Parenthetically Yours, Stories from Me to You by Eileen Raphael is a collection of amusing and sometimes poignant stories from her life starting in New Jersey in the  1960s through today. Also included are her Dad’s favorite stories from the 1920s to the 1940s in Union City, NJ. For a free copy, email Eileen at eileenmarieraphael@gmail.com.

In Starting From Paterson, Garret Keizer offers us “essays on an adult’s supermarket perplexity, a child’s religious formation, meeting Colonel Sanders and Paul Farmer, his love for his father-in-law, and the labor struggles that led to an eight-hour day, all connected to the author’s roots in Paterson, NJ, and the woman he came to love there.“

The Wind Cries Freedom: An Oral History of the Next American Revolution, by Michael Albert: This imaginative novel, set in a near-future America still reeling from the chaos of the Trump era, follows interviewer Miguel Guevara as he sits down with the varied activists and people from all walks of life to piece together how their work yielded a new kind of society.

The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel, edited by Paul Buhle: “A stunning graphic history of how enslaved Africans on board the Amistad rebelled and captured the slave ship in 1839, challenging a whitewashed version of history and putting the Africans back at the center of their own freedom story.”  

“What a gorgeous collection of poetry Aimee Suzara’s volume birth language is – a creation story that is intertextual, linguistically rigorous and precise, historical, deeply, deeply personal and vulnerable….  Her poetic voice is unwavering, a diasporic daughter talking back to colonial power sharp and unflinching.”

And from Mariana McDonald, the poem Data Centers, posted on TheNewVerse.News: “As farmers say goodbye to farms/and crops lie withering on the soil/the eyes of AI tech bros widen…”

Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed by a future where there are no prisons or police. Jordan Flaherty was a producer on the multidisciplinary team of artists, organizers, and cultural workers that put together this film.

¡Quba!, from filmmaker Kim Anno and assistant producer Barbara Maggiani, “documents Cuba’s extraordinary journey toward LGBTQ equality, culminating in the historic 2022 referendum that legalized same-sex marriage and adoption…. the film traces the decades-long struggle of activists who turned a revolution within the Revolution into reality.”