National Network for Equitable Library Service

Born into slavery, Callie House helped create the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in 1899 as a freedwoman. The organization, one of the first of its kind, campaigned for the reparations promised to African American freedmen by petitioning the government. Callie, their leader and voice of the movement, defied conventions of race, class, and gender with her ideas.

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's acquisition of language and what to pack in a diaper bag.

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world. In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body.

Twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall was pulled down by Berliners fed up with the division of their city, Stan Persky returns to Eastern Europe. In essays informative and insightful, he illuminates what some consider the final act the Second World War: the end of the occupation by the Soviets of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic nations.

"Canada's first woman trained for combat, a decorated officer in the "Van Doos" the legendary Royal 22nd Regiment, comes up against a system of institutional sexism. Throughout her training, Sandra Perron was repeatedly identified as top of her class, but was also subject to "pranks" that included stripping her uniform of insignia (which is a not-so-subtle way of informing her that her platoon did not have her back). The lessons she learned, however, weren't all negative - through several deployments, including Bosnia and Croatia, she forged lasting friendships with men and women.

"Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits," proclaims the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Simon Brault takes these words to heart and goes one step further. In No Culture, No Future, he establishes that arts are not just a right but a necessity. A longtime advocate of the arts in Montreal, Brault has taken action to re-establish that city as one of the most culturally accomplished communities in Canada.

Records the last months of Baldwin's ten-year self-exile in Europe, his return to Harlem, and his first trip south at the time of the school integration battles.

Liu lays out the elements and the strategies of citizen power, showing when to create a hashtag, when to call your Congressman, and when to take to the streets. (When you go, don't forget your camera.) Above all, Liu reminds us that someone always has power, which means if you're not participating, you're surrendering.

Writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes listeners across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides.

The story of Amy Biehl is well known in South Africa. The twenty-six-year-old white American was brutally murdered during the final days of apartheid. But the true story of Biehl's death is not only a story of forgiveness but also a reflection of the complicated history of a troubled country.