Six great books to add to your summer reading list

If you’re like us, you’re spending a lot more time at home this summer. While that’s been a drag on our summer barbecues, trips to the beach and vacation plans, it does mean we have more time to catch up on some great books we’ve missed.

We reached out to a few of our grantee partners to help us compile a great summer reading list just for our members. Here are six great book recommendations ranging from topics like women’s rights, voting rights, climate change, economic justice and more from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Sunrise Movement, Women’s March, Economic Policy Institute and Free Speech for People.

Fumbling Toward Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan 

Recommended by Nana Gyamfi, Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration:

“Building a world without cops and cages is going to require more than desire and vision – it’s going to require us to learn new ways of understanding and addressing interpersonal and community harm that are accessible to the people most impacted by violence in our society. This workbook lights and guides the way for those of us working for abolition in our lifetime.”

Assata: An Autobiography 

by Assata Shakur

Recommended by Tabitha St. Bernard-Jacobs, Director of Community Engagement, Women’s March:

“Assata’s story is one of injustice and pain but also one of inner liberation, of love and of laying it all on the line for the pursuit of that dream of liberation. It lays bare the failings of systems designed to marginalize and harm Black people and how community is sometimes all we have.”

Jane Eyre 

by Charlotte Bronte

Recommended by Thea M. Lee, President, Economic Policy Institute:

“I decided to go with Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, as it is a book I have loved and reread many times. As a young girl reading Jane Eyre, I was struck by the central character’s fierce independence, integrity and assertion of her humanity and inherent rights – despite her poverty, orphanhood, and lack of conventional beauty.”

Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can

By Varshini Prakash and Guido Girgenti

Recommended by Varshini Prakash, Executive Director, Sunrise Movement:

From the publisher: “An urgent and definitive collection of essays from leaders and experts championing the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it—including contributions by leading activists and progressive writers like Varshini Prakash, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Bill McKibben, Rev William Barber II, and more.”

The Undocumented Americans 

by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Recommended by John C. Bonifaz, President, Free Speech For People

“The march for justice, equality, and human dignity for all must include undocumented Americans.  In this powerful book, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio gives voice to what it means to be undocumented in America today.  And, she challenges us all to see the undocumented for who they are: human beings, whose stories, whose hopes and whose dreams must be heard.” 

Life on the Ground Floor: Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine

By James Maskalyk, MD. 

Recommended by Avril Benoît, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in the United States (MSF-USA):

“From the inside of an ER, this MD and writer who first came to my attention because he was a gifted blogger while on assignment with Doctors Without Borders, takes us on a journey into the viscera of bodies and souls under stress. If medical textbooks were written with such literary skill, we’d all want to be doctors.”