National Network for Equitable Library Service

When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was approached by the police on the front porch of his home in an affluent section of Cambridge, many people across the country reacted with surprise and disbelief. But many African American men from coast to coast were not surprised in the least. "Gatesgate" serves as the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon many black men experience regularly: being the subject of increased suspicion because of the color of their skin. In Twelve Angry Men, a dozen eloquent authors tell their own personal versions of this story.

Ten years ago, amateur photographer and school bus driver Cynthia Stewart dropped off eleven rolls of film at a drugstore near her home in Ohio. The rolls contained photographs of her eight-year-old daughter Nora, including two of the child in the shower-photos that would cause the county prosecutor to arrest Cynthia, take her away in handcuffs, threaten to remove her daughter from her home, and charge her with crimes that carried the possibility of sixteen years in prison.

The Skin That We Speak takes the discussion of language in the classroom beyond the highly charged war of idioms and presents today's teachers with a thoughtful exploration of the varieties of English that we speak, in what Black Issues Book Review calls "an essential text." Edited by bestselling author Lisa Delpit and education professor Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, the book includes an extended new piece by Delpit herself, as well as groundbreaking work by Herbert Kohl, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Victoria Purcell-Gates, as well as classic texts by Geneva Smitherman and Asa Hillia

Which acts by educators are "racist" and which are "antiracist"' How can an educator constructively discuss complex issues of race with students and colleagues' In Everyday Antiracism leading educators deal with the most challenging questions about race in school, offering invaluable and effective advice.

Although acceptance of difference is on the rise in America, it's the rare gay or lesbian person who has not been demeaned because of his or her sexual orientation, and this experience usually starts at home, among family members. Whether they are excluded from family love and approval, expected to accept second-class status for life, ignored by mainstream arts and entertainment, or abandoned when intervention would make all the difference, gay people are routinely subjected to forms of psychological and physical abuse unknown to many straight Americans.

A Mother Jones "Best Book of 2009," A Bomb in Every Issue uncovers the largely untold story of Ramparts magazine, the spectacular San Francisco muckraker that captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and repeatedly scooped the New York Times, changing American journalism forever.

Appealing to both comics fans and Asian Americans seeking to claim their place in American culture, Secret Identities makes brilliant use of the conventions of the superhero comic book to expose the real face of the Asian American experience.

Based on extensive archival work, Stormtrooper Families combines stormtrooper personnel records, Nazi Party autobiographies, published and unpublished memoirs, personal letters, court records, and police-surveillance records to paint a picture of the stormtrooper movement as an organic product of its local community, its web of interpersonal relationships, and its intensely emotional internal struggles.

Philosophy and anthropology have long debated questions of difference: rationality versus irrationality, abstraction versus concreteness, modern versus premodern.

Missionaries of the left, saviors are people of privilege who believe they have all the answers. They want to help, but don't want to listen; they lead but never follow. From post-Katrina New Orleans, to anti-sex-traficking work, to do-gooder journalists, Flaherty's book reveals saviors' misdeeds but also shows how activists can build new, stronger movements.