Right Politics

Is privilege real or imagined? It's clear that issues of race and equality have come to the forefront in our nation's consciousness. Every week yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across headlines and dominates our news feeds. But it's not easy to unpack the origins of these tensions, and perhaps we wonder whether any of these issues really has anything to do with us. Ken Wytsma, founder of The Justice Conference, understands these questions.

Award-winning journalist David Batstone reveals the story of a new generation of 21st century abolitionists and their heroic campaign to put an end to human bondage. In his accessible and inspiring book, Batstone carefully weaves the narratives of activists and those in bondage in a way that not only raises awareness of the modern-day slave trade, but also serves as a call to action.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

Personhood chronicles the internal struggles and changing ideas about race, sex, religion, war, corporate rights, and poverty that shaped the personhood struggle over half a century. The book explores how Americans came to take for granted that fetal personhood requires criminalization and suggests that other ways of valuing both fetal life and women's equality might be possible.

Less than three weeks before the 1960 presidential election, 31-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested at a sit-in at Rich's Department Store in Atlanta. That day would lead to the first night King had ever spent in jail - and the time that King's family most feared for his life. Based on fresh interviews, newspaper accounts, and extensive archival research, Nine Days is the first full recounting of an event that changed the course of one of the closest elections in American history.

It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal - that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding - reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat is a highly entertaining and illuminating journey through the full spectrum of human-animal relations. Drawing on his groundbreaking research in the field of anthrozoology, Dr. Hal Herzog tries to make sense of our complex relationships with animals and the challenging moral conundrums we face regarding these creatures who share our world - and some, our homes. .

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.

This sweeping survey of Black history shows how Black humanity has been erased and how its recovery can save the humanity of us all. Using history as a foundation, The Humanity Archive uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history. The Humanity Archive focuses on the overlooked narratives in the pages of the past. Challenging dominant perspectives, author Jermaine Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories.

Every schoolchild is taught the great turning points in American history, such as Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. But other, equally significant events have altered our destiny without being understood---or even widely noticed. Acclaimed conservative historian Larry Schweikart now takes an in-depth look at seven such episodes and reveals the profound ways they have shaped America.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

The modern conception of sacrifice is at once cast as a victory of self-discipline over desire and condescended to as destructive and archaic abnegation. But even in the Old Testament, the dual natures of sacrifice, embodying both ritual slaughter and moral rectitude, were at odds. In this analysis, Terry Eagleton makes a compelling argument that the idea of sacrifice has long been misunderstood. Pursuing the complex lineage of sacrifice in a lyrical discourse, Eagleton focuses on the Old and New Testaments, offering a virtuosic analysis of the crucifixion.

Author Bakari Sellers expands on the issues he addressed in his New York Times bestseller My Vanishing Country, examining national politics and policies that deeply impact not only Black people in his home state of South Carolina but the lives of millions of African Americans in communities across the nation. Four years later, Sellers has an answer to the question he raised on CNN, offering much-needed prescriptions to help all Black American lives.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

In this eye-opening book, Matthew Rose introduces us to one of the most controversial intellectual movements of the 20th century, the "radical right", and discusses its adherents' different attempts to imagine political societies after the death or decline of liberalism. Questioning democracy's most basic norms and practices, these critics rejected ideas about human equality, minority rights, religious toleration, and cultural pluralism not out of implicit biases, but out of explicit principle.

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

A majority of American households give to charity in some form or another. Whether you're in a position to give $1 or $1 million, every giver needs to answer the same question: How do I channel my giving effectively to make the greatest difference? In Giving Done Right, Phil Buchanan, the president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, arms donors with what it takes to do more good more quickly and to avoid predictable errors that lead too many astray.

In the immediate term, World Peace shows how steps to strengthen compliance with international law, improve collective action like international peacekeeping and peace-building, better regulate the flow of arms, and hold individuals legally accountable for acts of aggression or atrocity crimes can make our world more peaceful. In the long term, it shows that building strong, legitimate states that protect the rights and secure the livelihoods of their people, gender equal societies, and protecting the right of individuals to opt-out of wars can potentially establish world peace.