Politics & Government

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“The Flowers,” a short story by Alice Walker, considers the impact of the Jim Crow South on a young Black girl’s emotional development and social awareness. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983—along with a National Book Award—for her critically acclaimed work The Color Purple (1982). Her experience growing up poor in the segregated sharecropping community of Eatonton, Georgia, as well as her advocacy as a Womanist activist, inform the personal and social... Read The Flowers Summary

Published in 1945, The Fountainhead was written by Russian American author Ayn Rand (1905-1982) and focuses on the genius architect Howard Roark as he struggles to pursue a career of innovation and integrity in an increasingly hostile society of altruists and con men led by the Machiavellian humanitarian Ellsworth Toohey.In The Fountainhead, Rand promotes values such as radical individualism and the primacy of objective reason, both of which would later form the foundation of her... Read The Fountainhead Summary

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The German Ideology is a set of pamphlets written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1846. This was the first book cowritten by Marx and Engels. However, the authors could not find a publisher and the text wasn’t published until 1932. The book is divided into three main sections. The Introduction is the most widely referenced part of The German Ideology. The other sections, Volume 1 and Volume 2, are polemical responses to popular... Read The German Ideology Summary

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The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, is Hyeonseo Lee’s 2015 autobiography. Lee leaves North Korea shortly before her eighteenth birthday. She does not intend to defect. She has received a lifetime of propaganda and truly believes her country is the best in the world. She is simply a curious child who wanted to see China, and intends to return to North Korea within days. Once in China, however, she is exposed... Read The Girl with Seven Names Summary

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a classic novel by American author John Steinbeck. It centers on the Joads, an Oklahoma family evicted from their farm following the 1930s dust storms which ruined local crops. Losing their land, the Joads travel to California to seek work. On their journey they encounter hardship, prejudice, and police intimidation. However, when they get there, things become worse. They must stay in squalid camps and discover that work for... Read The Grapes of Wrath Summary

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The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, was first published in 1944 and is a nonfiction work of economic history. The most recent 2001 edition features a Foreword by renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz as well as an Introduction by sociology professor Fred Block, both of which tout the continued relevance of Polanyi’s work. Throughout the work itself, Polanyi discusses the social and economic changes—what he terms “the great transformation”—that occurred as a result of the Industrial... Read The Great Transformation Summary

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The Guns of August is a 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of nonfiction by Barbara W. Tuchman. Tuchman achieved prominence as a historian with her third book, The Zimmerman Telegram, and international fame with The Guns of August. Encompassing the European political arena from King Edward VII’s death through the first month of World War I, The Guns of August offers clarity on the causes of the war, its inevitability, and how it shaped the modern... Read The Guns of August Summary

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize and the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize, Edward E. Baptist’s 2014 book, The Half Has Never Been Told, challenges revisionist historical studies and presents slavery as a modern and modernizing institution that was central to the creation of American wealth and power. Drawing on slave narratives and other sources, it examines the development and growth of American slavery and the far-reaching effects it had on the nation from... Read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Summary

Anthropologist David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019) revives Indigenous history and centers Indigenous people as subjects, not as mere victims of American avarice. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Treuer is a member of the Ojibwe tribe from the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota. He has a doctorate in anthropology, teaches at the University of Southern California, and is the... Read The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Summary

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The Human Condition, written by Hannah Arendt and originally published in 1958, is a work of political and philosophical nonfiction. Arendt, a German-American philosopher and political theorist, divides the central theme of the book, vita activa, into three distinct functions: labor, work, and action. Her analyses of these three concepts form the philosophical core of the book. The rest of the book is historical in approach.Part 1 serves as an introduction to Arendt’s argument. She... Read The Human Condition Summary