National Network for Equitable Library Service

Jackie Robinson, President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, O. J. Simpson, and Christopher Darden have all been accused of being an Uncle Tom during their careers. How, why, and with what consequences for our society did Uncle Tom morph first into a servile old man and then into a racial epithet hurled at African American men deemed, by other Black people, to have betrayed their race? Uncle Tom, the eponymous figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was a loyal Christian who died a martyr's death.

This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we're allowed to "go" in public. Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond.

From Jane Austen to Taylor Swift, a look at the surprising politics of romantic love and its dissolution. Whatever the underlying motives - be they love, financial security, or mere masochism - the fact is that getting involved in a romantic partnership is emotionally, morally, and even politically fraught. In Hard To Do, Kelli María Korducki turns a Marxist lens on the relatively short history of romantic partnership, tracing how the socio-economic dynamics between men and women have transformed the ways women conceive of domestic partnership.

A provocative look at why our current understanding of female sexuality isn't getting us off. We think of the modern woman as sexually liberated - if anything, we're told we're oversexed. Yet a striking number of women are dissatisfied with their sex lives. Over half of women report having a sexual complaint, whether that's lack of desire or difficulty reaching orgasm. But this issue doesn't get much press; the urge is to ignore or medicalize it (witness the quest for 'pink Viagra').

ARRESTING HOPE reminds us that prisons are not only places of punishment, marginalization, and trauma, but that they can also be places of hope, blessing even, where people with difficult lived experiences can begin to compose stories full of healing, anticipation, communication, education, connection, and community. The book tells a story about women in a provincial prison in Canada, about how creative leadership fostered opportunities for transformation and hope, and about how engaging in research and writing contributed to healing.

A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote--and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 "the worst ... ever." Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché.

Leslie Kern wants your city to be feminist. "Feminist city: a field guide" combines memoir, feminist theory, pop culture, and geography to expose what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built right into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. Focusing on gendered experiences of the city, the books grapples with the challenge of claiming urban space amongst barriers designed to keep women "in their place." From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle.

Follows the story of a famous Ojibwe medicine man, his gifted grandson, and remarkable water drum. This drum, and forty other artefacts, were given away by a Canadian museum to an American Anishinaabe group that had no family or community connections to the collection. Many years passed before the drum was returned to the family. Matthews takes us through this astonishing set of events from multiple perspectives, exploring community and museum viewpoints, visiting the ceremonial group leader in Wisconsin, and finally looking back from the point of view of the drum.

Migration is perhaps the most pressing issue of our time, and it has completely decentered European politics in recent years. But as we consider the current refugee crisis, acclaimed historian Peter Gatrell reminds us that the history of Europe has always been one of people on the move. The end of World War II left Europe in a state of confusion with many Europeans virtually stateless. Later, as former colonial states gained national independence, colonists and their supporters migrated to often-unwelcoming metropoles.

Lesbian. Bisexual. Queer. Transgender. Straight. Curious. This book is for everyone, regardless of gender or sexual preference. This book is for anyone who's ever dared to wonder. This book is for you. There's a long-running joke that, after "coming out," a lesbian, gay guy, bisexual, or trans person should receive a membership card and instruction manual. This is that instruction manual. You're welcome. Inside you'll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask: from sex to politics and hooking up to stereotypes, coming out, and more.