Welcome back! We are so pleased you are joining us for our podcast book group: Reading with Libraries! This week we will be talking about books about advocacy and activism!

In our book group, we have fun talking about books and provide useful information for library people doing Reader’s Advisory work. There are so many books out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

Our book group is very inclusive; there are no “right” or “wrong” books here! We just like to read and chat about books, and want you to share what you are reading too! All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together.

This week we are so pleased to promote a local author, Habso Mohamud! Habso has written an excellent children’s book  It Only Takes One Yes and we have three copies to give away to the first three people that comment on this episode’s show notes page.

Beverages:

Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages, and we each came prepared with our own drink to enjoy while we talk about our books. You are an important part of this book group, so if you don’t have a beverage go ahead and get one now.

Each of our beverages will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself! This week we’re having beverages from companies that are making a conscious effort to treat their employees and the environment with consideration and respect.

Peace Coffee:
We purchase only organic, fair trade coffees from small-scale grower cooperatives that invest in their farmers to combat unstable markets and shifting climates.
The Twin Cities Blend:
roast: dark

acidity: soft

body: syrupy

aroma: nutty, honey, roasted almond, & chocolate

tasting notes: toasted walnut, cocoa, caramel

Equal Exchange Tea:
Equal Exchange’s mission is to build long-term trade partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relationships between farmers and consumers and to demonstrate, through our success, the contribution of worker co-operatives and Fair Trade to a more equitable, democratic and sustainable world.
Organic Mint Green Tea:
Revive yourself with the cooling combination of green tea and peppermint. Invigorate your senses.
Aroma: mint, honey

Flavor: mint, lemon grass, mellow astringency

Sierra Nevada Beer:
We have been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally for our commitment to reducing our environmental impact. Although we have proven to be a leader in environmental sustainability, we are always looking for the next step we can take to be more efficient.

Hop Hunter IPA:
Hop Hunter IPA harnesses the complex flavors of just-picked hops through an all-new method of steam distilling wet hops before they even leave the fields. This revolutionary technique captures and intensifies the natural flavors, creating a unique and intensely aromatic beer. Our custom process gathers pure hop oil which, when combined with traditional whole-cone hops in the brew kettle, makes for an incredible IPA experience.

Genre Discussion:

So, we have our beverages, let’s get some more information about today’s genre of advocacy and activism books!

Let’s start off with a simple definition of advocacy: the act or process of supporting a cause or proposal. For example, at CMLE, we talk A LOT about the necessity of advocating for libraries!

The definition of activism is the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.

Our books today will include the experiences of activists as well as suggestions for how to be more effective in your own advocacy work! Side note: We really encourage you to advocate for libraries! If you don’t know why this is important or just need help getting started, send us an email: admin@cmle.org or visit cmle.org and we’d be happy to help you!

Suggested Reading Resources:  

• Activism and Advocacy: Selected full-text books and articles
• Popular Advocacy Books – Goodreads
• Popular Activism Books – Goodreads
• 10 Nonfiction Books About Activism For Teens
• 12 Books for Ages Pre-K – 8 On Social Activism
• Making Our Voices Heard: Books About Activism For Kids – Brightly
• A Nation Mobilized: 10 Books on Contemporary Activism in America
• Book Bites mini podcast – Voting and Election Books

Our Book Discussion

Now that we’ve enjoyed our special beverages and learned more about this week’s genre, let’s get on with our book discussion!

Quick note: We reference a medical debt relief website you can contribute to, but didn’t get the right name. It is called RIP Medical Debt, and you can go there right now to contribute to getting rid of medical debts for people!

As always, the links and info below are from Amazon.com. If you click thru, and happen to buy a nice book or anything else, Amazon gives us a small percentage of their profits. Thank you!! We really appreciate your support!

Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay, by Phoebe Robinson

Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson’s latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics: giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society’s beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture’s obsession with work. Robinson also gets personal, exploring money problems she’s hidden from her parents, how dating is mainly a warmed-over bowl of hot mess, and definitely most important, meeting Bono not once, but twice. She’s struggled with being a woman with a political mind and a woman with an ever-changing jeans size. She knows about trash because she sees it every day–and because she’s seen roughly one hundred thousand hours of reality TV and zero hours of Schindler’s List.

As a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, Aaron Lansky set out to save the world’s abandoned Yiddish books before it was too late. Today, more than a million books later, he has accomplished what has been called “the greatest cultural rescue effort in Jewish history.” In Outwitting History, Lansky shares his adventures as well as the poignant and often laugh-out-loud stories he heard as he traveled the country collecting books. Introducing us to a dazzling array of writers, he shows us how an almost-lost culture is the bridge between the old world and the future—and how the written word can unite everyone who believes in the power of great literature

From Amy Reed, Ellen Hopkins, Amber Smith, Sandhya Menon, and more of your favorite YA authors comes an anthology of essays that explore the diverse experiences of injustice, empowerment, and growing up female in America.

This collection of twenty-one essays from major YA authors—including award-winning and bestselling writers—touches on a powerful range of topics related to growing up female in today’s America, and the intersection with race, religion, and ethnicity. Sure to inspire hope and solidarity to anyone who reads it, Our Stories, Our Voices belongs on every young woman’s shelf.

This anthology features essays from Martha Brockenbrough, Jaye Robin Brown, Sona Charaipotra, Brandy Colbert, Somaiya Daud, Christine Day, Alexandra Duncan, Ilene Wong (I.W.) Gregorio, Maurene Goo. Ellen Hopkins, Stephanie Kuehnert, Nina LaCour, Anna-Marie LcLemore, Sandhya Menon, Hannah Moskowitz, Julie Murphy, Aisha Saeed, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Amber Smith, and Tracy Walker.

How We Do Harm exposes the underbelly of healthcare today―the overtreatment of the rich, the under treatment of the poor, the financial conflicts of interest that determine the care that physicians’ provide, insurance companies that don’t demand the best (or even the least expensive) care, and pharmaceutical companies concerned with selling drugs, regardless of whether they improve health or do harm.

Dr. Otis Brawley is the chief medical and scientific officer of The American Cancer Society, an oncologist with a dazzling clinical, research, and policy career. How We Do Harm pulls back the curtain on how medicine is really practiced in America. Brawley tells of doctors who select treatment based on payment they will receive, rather than on demonstrated scientific results; hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that seek out patients to treat even if they are not actually ill (but as long as their insurance will pay); a public primed to swallow the latest pill, no matter the cost; and rising healthcare costs for unnecessary―and often unproven―treatments that we all pay for. Brawley calls for rational healthcare, healthcare drawn from results-based, scientifically justifiable treatments, and not just the peddling of hot new drugs.

Brawley’s personal history – from a childhood in the gang-ridden streets of black Detroit, to the green hallways of Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest public hospital in the U.S., to the boardrooms of The American Cancer Society―results in a passionate view of medicine and the politics of illness in America – and a deep understanding of healthcare today. How We Do Harm is his well-reasoned manifesto for change.

In Doing Harm, Dusenbery explores the deep, systemic problems that underlie women’s experiences of feeling dismissed by the medical system. Women have been discharged from the emergency room mid-heart attack with a prescription for anti-anxiety meds, while others with autoimmune diseases have been labeled “chronic complainers” for years before being properly diagnosed. Women with endometriosis have been told they are just overreacting to “normal” menstrual cramps, while still others have “contested” illnesses like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia that, dogged by psychosomatic suspicions, have yet to be fully accepted as “real” diseases by the whole of the profession.

An eye-opening read for patients and health care providers alike, Doing Harm shows how women suffer because the medical community knows relatively less about their diseases and bodies and too often doesn’t trust their reports of their symptoms. The research community has neglected conditions that disproportionately affect women and paid little attention to biological differences between the sexes in everything from drug metabolism to the disease factors—even the symptoms of a heart attack. Meanwhile, a long history of viewing women as especially prone to “hysteria” reverberates to the present day, leaving women battling against a stereotype that they’re hypochondriacs whose ailments are likely to be “all in their heads.” 

Offering a clear-eyed explanation of the root causes of this insidious and entrenched bias and laying out its sometimes catastrophic consequences, Doing Harm is a rallying wake-up call that will change the way we look at health care for women.

When Revathi’s powerful memoir, The Truth About Me, first appeared in 2011, it caused a sensation. Readers learned of Revathi’s childhood unease with her male body, her escape from her birth family to a house of hijras (the South Asian generic term for transgender people), and her eventual transition to being the woman she always knew she was. This new book charts her remarkable journey from relative obscurity to becoming India’s leading spokesperson for transgender rights and an inspiration to thousands.

Revathi describes her life, her work in the NGO Sangama, which works with people across a spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations, and how she rose from office assistant to director in the organization. Today she is an independent activist, theatre person, actor and writer, and works for the rights of transgender persons.

In the second part of the book, Revathi offers the reader an insight into one of the least talked about experiences on the gender trajectory: that of being trans men. Calling several female-to-male trans persons her ‘sons’, Revathi puts before us their moving, passionate and sometimes tragic stories of marginalization, courage, resistance and triumph.

At age eleven, Kenan Trebincevic was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brcko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero – Kenan’s beloved karate coach – showed up at his door with an AK-47 – screaming: “You have one hour to leave or be killed!” Kenan’s only crime: he was Muslim. This poignant, searing memoir chronicles Kenan’s miraculous escape from the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that swept the former Yugoslavia. After two decades in the United States, Kenan honors his father’s wish to visit their homeland, making a list of what he wants to do there. Kenan decides to confront the former next door neighbor who stole from his mother, see the concentration camp where his Dad and brother were imprisoned and stand on the grave of his first betrayer to make sure he’s really dead. Back in the land of his birth, Kenan finds something more powerful—and shocking—than revenge.

Little Feminist Board Book Set is comprised of colorful illustrated portraits of real women who have made historical impact on the world. Illustrations by Lydia Ortiz and words by Emily Kleinman introduce children to these important people in history with images that are fun for youngsters and also realistic. The Board Book Set includes 4 mini board books (Pioneers, Artists, Leaders, and Activists.)
– Size: 4 x 4 x 4″
– Includes Artists: Maya Angelou,  Joesphine Baker, Frida Kahlo and Ella Fitzgerald
– Includes Leaders: Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I, Indira Gandhi and Hillary Clinton
– Includes Activists: Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem and Malala Yousafza
– Includes Pioneers: Marie Curie, Sally Ride, Amelia Earhart and Billie Jean King

Upon it’s first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. An international bestseller, a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and made into a critically acclaimed movie, Shilts’ expose revealed why AIDS was allowed to spread unchecked during the early 80’s while the most trusted institutions ignored or denied the threat. One of the few true modern classics, it changed and framed how AIDS was discussed in the following years. Now republished in a special 20th Anniversary edition, And the Band Played On remains one of the essential books of our time.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us for this discussion about advocacy books on our Reading with Libraries podcast book group! Listeners, don’t forget we have three copies of Habso’s book  It Only Takes One Yes to give away to the first three people that comment on this episode’s show notes page! Leave us a comment and we’ll mail or bring you the book to include in your school or library!

Join us next Thursday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries – which is always interesting! – subscribe to our podcast Linking Our Libraries.

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!