Contemporary Books on Social Justice
Social justice is the pursuit of fairness in society based on the belief that all people deserve equal opportunities and rights. We curated the following study guide collection (including books for middle-grade and young adult readers) to help readers get the most out of books that cover contemporary issues and topics in social justice.
Published in 2015, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America is a nonfiction investigation into how a new form of virtually cashless poverty emerged in the United States. Authors Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer are both academics with extensive experience researching poverty, but it is only in recent years that they have come across households with almost no cash income at all. There are now 1.5 million families with children in... Read $2.00 a Day Summary
A Cup of Water Under My Bed is Daisy Hernández’s 2014 coming-of-age story that centers the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The book received Lambda Literary’s Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award in 2015. Hernández was also awarded the IPPY Award (Independent Publisher Book Award) for best coming-of-age memoir, and the book was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. This memoir highlights the complicated dynamics that shape race, class, gender, and sexual... Read A Cup of Water Under My Bed Summary
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki is a revisionist account of American history that provides an in-depth view of America as a country populated and built by diverse peoples of the world. Originally published in 1993 by Little, Brown and Company, this study guide uses the updated 2008 edition. In 1994 A Different Mirror received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its contributions to advancing understandings of racism and human diversity.Takaki’s... Read A Different Mirror Summary
A Few Good Men is a play written by Aaron Sorkin and first performed in 1989. The story involves a military lawyer who defends two Marines accused of murder. The play was well-received, and Sorkin adapted it into a screenplay for the film of the same name (released in 1992), which was a popular and critical success.Plot SummaryA Few Good Men opens as two Marines, Downey and Dawson, recall the details of a nighttime incident... Read A Few Good Men Summary
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (2017) is a nonfiction book written by Raj Patel, a political economist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jason W. Moore, an environmental historian and associate professor at Binghamton University. The authors’ expertise in political economy and environmental history provides a unique perspective on the interconnected nature of capitalism and ecological... Read A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things Summary
A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea is a 2017 book by Melissa Fleming, telling the true story of a young girl named Doaa who fled the Syrian civil war. Made a refugee by the conflict, she travels to Egypt and then attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. The book has won numerous awards.Plot SummaryThe story opens with Doaa Al Zamel floating in the sea amid the wreckage of a ship. Her husband is... Read A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea Summary
All American Boys is a young-adult novel published in 2015. This modern-day narrative tells the story of an incident of police brutality through the alternating voices of two high school students: Rashad, whose chapters are written by author Jason Reynolds, and Quinn, whose chapters are written by author Brendan Kiely. While Rashad and Quinn never actually meet in the novel, their lives intersect in a powerful way after a violent act of racism rocks their... Read All American Boys Summary
Twelve-year-old Amal’s dreams of becoming a teacher are shattered when she disrespects the powerful landlord of her Pakistani village and is forced into a life of servitude in the New York Times bestselling Amal Unbound (2018). Author Aisha Saeed is a Pakistani-American teacher, writer, and attorney as well as a founder of the We Need Diverse Books organization. In Amal Unbound, Saeed calls attention to contemporary global inequities, exploring themes of social injustice, education, and... Read Amal Unbound Summary
American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures (2018) is an essay collection edited by actress and activist America Ferrera with E. Cayce Dumont. The collection contains essays from notable individuals in movie and TV entertainment, food, publishing, public service, comedy, music, and self-help content creation. These first-person accounts all address the often troublesome question of what it means to be American, especially when growing up between different cultures. American Like Me is a New... Read American Like Me Summary
Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia was originally published in 1975 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. This summary references the Norton paperback edition reissued in 2003. Morgan seeks to discover how America’s Founding Fathers came to advocate for freedom and equality when many of them owned slaves. Morgan chose to study Virginia’s Founding Fathers because they were among the most vocal in their opposition to the monarchy, because... Read American Slavery, American Freedom Summary
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book by journalist and poet Eliza Griswold. This study guide follows the book’s first edition, which was published in 2018. Griswold is a journalist known for investigative reporting into political issues, having previously published articles in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. In Amity and Prosperity, Griswold investigates natural gas companies drilling in Pennsylvania’s western Washington County. The... Read Amity and Prosperity Summary
Angela Davis: An Autobiography, originally published in 1974, is a political autobiography focused on the imprisonment and trial of activist and scholar Angela Davis in the early 1970s. In 1970, after guns belonging to Davis were used in an uprising at the Marin County Courthouse in California, Davis was accused and convicted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. A jury acquitted Davis of all charges in 1972. She published her autobiography two years later to center... Read Angela Davis Summary
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a book by renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Published in 1975 and re-released most recently in 2009, with an additional preface by the author, the book is widely recognized as a foundational text within the animal liberation movement. Singer tries to persuade the reader of his or her own implicit “speciesism,” a term he popularized, and he argues that the discrimination against other species... Read Animal Liberation Summary
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People is a 2019 adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2015 nonfiction book. Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese adapted the material for middle-grade audiences. The original publication received the American Book Award, and this version is a 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book with recognition from the National Council for the Social Studies and the Children’s Book Council. This book tells the perspective of... Read An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People Summary
Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a 2009 non-fiction book that examines the behavior of people amid and after disasters as well as the institutional failure that can worsen disasters. Solnit explores five major disasters and detours to discuss several others while providing commentary on contemporary Western culture, anarchism, and the media’s portrayal of disaster victims.Solnit and the many sociologists she cites present an optimistic view... Read A Paradise Built in Hell Summary
A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity is a nonfiction book published in 2014 by the husband-and-wife team of Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book speaks to altruism and how people can do something to promote more opportunities for others around the world. The authors declare, “We wrote this book mostly to encourage others—rich and poor alike—to join in this push to improve the world” (16). They promote three ways of doing so:... Read A Path Appears Summary
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is one of the most famous American history books published in recent decades. It has sold over two million copies. First published in 1980, the book was nominated for the American Book Award and has gone through at least six major revisions. Although controversial when first published, the book has become comfortably mainstream. It is mentioned by name in the film Good Will Hunting and the... Read A People’s History of the United States Summary
Jack London’s 1909 “A Piece of Steak” is a naturalist short story first published in The Saturday Evening Post. It took him between two and four weeks to write, and he was paid a very handsome (for the era) $500 for it. While London is best known for his novels about the Alaskan wilderness, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang, he was also interested in workers’ rights and advocated for socialism and... Read A Piece of Steak Summary
Jimmy Santiago Baca, born in 1952, is an American poet and author of A Place to Stand. This memoir begins with Baca’s early years at home with his drunken, abusive father and his unhappy mother. Baca loves his father, who is continually in and out of jail, but Baca’s mother abandons her three children to marry a man who can provide her a more stable life.Baca, his brother, and his sister live with their grandparents... Read A Place to Stand Summary
Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice depicts the racial turmoil in Detroit in 1925 through the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician who faces murder charges after trying to defend his home in an all-white neighborhood from mob violence. The grandson of a slave, Ossian moves northward during the Great Migration to get his education at Wilberforce and Howard Universities. After graduating Howard's medical school, Ossian sets up practice and residence in Black Bottom... Read Arc of Justice Summary