Necessary Trouble

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America. To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions—not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans’ lives. A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted” and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own—one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in. Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman’s life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today. Includes black-and-white images

Necessary Trouble is the definitive book on the movements that are poised to permanently remake American politics. We are witnessing a moment of unprecedented political turmoil and social activism. Over the last few years, we've seen the growth of the Tea Party, a twenty-first-century black freedom struggle with BlackLivesMatter, Occupy Wall Street, and the grassroots networks supporting presidential candidates in defiance of the traditional party elites. Sarah Jaffe leads readers into the heart of these movements, explaining what has made ordinary Americans become activists. As Jaffe argues, the financial crisis in 2008 was the spark, the moment that crystallized that something was wrong. For years, Jaffe crisscrossed the country, asking people what they were angry about, and what they were doing to take power back. She attended a people's assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and went door-to-door in Queens days after Hurricane Sandy. From the successful fight for a 15 minimum wage in Seattle and New York to the halting of Shell's Arctic drilling program, Americans are discovering the effectiveness of making good, necessary trouble. Regardless of political alignment, they are boldly challenging who wields power in this country.

Get the Summary of Drew Gilpin Faust's Necessary Trouble in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Drew Gilpin Faust's memoir, "Necessary Trouble," delves into her personal history, reflecting on her mother's life and the societal constraints of her era. Catharine Ginna Mellick, Faust's mother, found purpose in marriage and as a courier for the Frontier Nursing Service, but her life was confined by the expectations of her time. Faust's family history is marked by military service, with wars shaping their lives and societal roles...

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed "upscale" consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function.

The authoritarian threat to our democracy is real. MAGA Republicans and religious extremists from the far right have allied with Putin’s Russian regime to destroy America’s rich history of indivdual freedoms and human rights. The author proposes than an antidote to this fatal threat is a political alliance of responsible, caring, reasonable Americans from various political blocs, including RINOS, DINOS, Independents, Liberals, and Libertarians. Their common goal of saving American democracy from the extremists far outweighs their differences in policies and perspectives.

Thug Criminology combines the urgent and as yet silenced voices of former gang/street-involved peoples turned academics, alongside their allies, in order to challenge and disrupt mainstream and academic knowledge about urban youth gangs specifically, and the "streets" more broadly. The book questions how the "streets" – and the racialized and marginalized urban communities who inhabit them – are researched, taught, and subsequently politicized. It looks at who gets to produce such knowledge, who benefits from such knowledge, and whose voices are privileged within dominant academic and public policy discourses. Drawing on decolonizing methodologies, the book seeks to give voice to scholars with lived experience of a "street" or gang life. Adam Ellis, Olga Marques, and Anthony Gunter reclaim the terms thug and gang to reconstruct the narrative around street-involved youth, seeing them not as criminals but rather as survivors of historical oppression and trauma. Challenging the colonial structure of criminology and other disciplines that focus on street crime, Thug Criminology aims to disrupt and disentangle the knowledge that has been produced on gangs and urban violence.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition Coming soon as an FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this. As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place. A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope. Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, fissures, and fractures in the fabric of America’s foundations, American life, and the very pillars of our democracy. As the oldest and most enduring democracy in the world, the pandemic that took the lives of six hundred thousand-plus souls in the U.S. alone, followed by racial disparities, a tumultuous presidential election, and the aftermath that led to the most restrictive and fierce state laws to suppress the votes of the country’s minority populations and conceal their history and racial experiences. In fact, before these events, prepandemic schooling in the United States was always tenuous for many minorities and the poor in the educational process. Education in America was designed for the privileged, the wealthy, and the white male. When it became available to other economic levels, women, racial, and ethnic groups, minorities were already behind, and it seems that the more these groups have strived to gain access economically, educationally, politically, and socially, they are still striving for equal access to the American dream and the opportunity of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Education is the key to attaining this access and generational success. Through the lens of her life and a forty-two-year career as a public school educator, first-time author Scarlet Harvey Black looks backward and forward to how we got here and adds her thoughts to the discourse on how we move on. She addresses “white privilege” and systemic prejudice that characterizes the barriers and obstacles faced by minority and poor students in America’s schools and the impact that decades of these sustained barriers have on the trajectory of a student’s life or potential. With the anecdotal narratives she lived and the hard truths she learned along the way, Scarlet Harvey Black is candid and heartfelt in the writing of her accounts. She challenges us to have tough and honest conversations on where we go from here to ensure that every child in this country has access to a quality learning environment and a quality teacher to deliver the instruction needed for them to achieve their highest aspirations in the country they call home!