Beacon: 545 books

Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world. Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving...

Essays on Latinx and Caribbean identity and on globalization by renowned women writers, including Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the voices of sixteen acclaimed writer-activists for a one-of-a-kind...

A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom   Fifty countries treat sex work as a legitimate job, and...

The true story of an immigrant's murder that turned a quaint village on the Long Island shore into ground zero in the war on immigration   In November of 2008, Marcelo Lucero, a thirty-seven-year-old undocumented Ecuadorean immigrant, was brutally attacked and murdered by a group of teenagers as...

A true account of one woman's quest to move a vacation cottage across Cape Cod to create a home, and the people, complications, and self-discoveries she encountered along the way. When Kate Whouley saw the classified ad for an abandoned vacation cottage, she began to dream: Transport the cottage...

Independent journalist Garry Leech has spent the last eight years working in the most remote and dangerous regions of Colombia, uncovering the unofficial stories of people living in conflict zones. Beyond Bogotá is framed around the eleven hours that Leech was held captive by the FARC, Colombia's...

Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters was playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like roaring surf, one of them said later. Like a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence, said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair...

The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone. More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war...

Winner of the Christopher Award and the New York City Book Award Winner of the 2016 Wheatley Book Award in Nonfiction A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer.   When...

In this groundbreaking compilation of first-person accounts of the runaway slave phenomenon, editors Devon Carbado and Donald Weise have recovered twelve narratives spanning eight decades—more than half of which have been long out of print. Told in the voices of the runaway slaves themselves, these...

For hundreds of years, the history of the conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztecs has been told in the words of the Spanish victors. Miguel León-Portilla has long been at the forefront of expanding that history to include the voices of indigenous peoples. In this new and updated edition of...

He was complex, quirky, pugnacious, and difficult. He seemed to create enemies wherever he went, even among his friends. A fireplug of a man who stood only five feet eight inches in his stocking feet, he had an outsized ambition to make his mark on the world. And he did. William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937)...

A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science   In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set...

With the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, once again America's men and women who have seen war close-up are suddenly expected to return seamlessly to civilian life. In Flashback, Penny Coleman tells the cautionary and timely story of posttraumatic stress disorder in the hope that we can sensitively...