Upper High School Books

We have curated titles from a collection of reliable review sources. We know our list can never be complete. If you have additional suggestions, please email studentsneedlibraries@gmail.com.

This page is only titles for more ADVANCED STUDENTS. 
A broader listing of Fiction, Nonfiction and media resources for all HIGH SCHOOL students can be found on the linked pages.

FICTION
Imarisha, Walidah, ed. Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. AK Press, 2015. “Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.” SHORT STORIES; SCIFI; FANTASY

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NONFICTION
Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury 2017. “From the Civil War to our combustible present, White Rage reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. …” RACISM 
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge Classics, 1990. “...explore[s] the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals and writers, both within the academy and without.” BLACK FEMINISM
Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?. Seven Stories Press, 2003. “[p]ut[s] the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison.” PRISON
DiAngelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon, 2018. “...examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.” RACISM
Eberhardt, Jennifer. Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Penguin, 2020. “How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? …” RACISM
Jobin-Leeds, Greg and AgitArte. When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World. “Longtime social activist Greg Jobin-Leeds joins forces with AgitArte, a collective of artists and organizers, to capture the stories, philosophy, tactics, and art of today’s leading social change movements.” ACTIVISM
Solomon, Akiba and Kenrya Rankin. How We Fight White Supremacy. Nation, 2019. “A master class in contemporary Black culture and thought…” RACISM; ACTIVISM 
Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty First Century. UCalifornia Press, 2018. “[A]ward-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition. ... From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.” BLACK LIVES MATTER 
Roberts, Dorothy. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New Press, 2011. “...by legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts[, this title] examines how the myth of race as a biological concept—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era. RACISM; GENETICS
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. American  Lynching. Yale U, 2012. “In this meticulously researched and accessibly written interpretive history, Rushdy shows how lynching in America has endured, evolved, and changed in meaning over the course of three centuries…” LYNCHING
Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket, 2016. “[This] searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order offers important context for understanding the necessity of the emerging movement for black liberation.” 

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