Books

In We Grow the World Together, Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson bring together a remarkable collection of voices – from Mariame Kaba to 6-year-old EJ – revealing the complex tapestry of ways people are living abolition in their daily lives through parenting and caregiving. Ranging from personal narratives to policy-focused analysis to activist chronicles, these writers highlight how abolition is essential to any kind of parenting justice.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes (host of Truthout’s Movement Memos podcast) examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law exposes how a kinder narrative of reform obscures an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.

This collection of reports and essays – the first collaboration between Truthout and Haymarket Books – explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities; miscarriages of justice; and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police.

In these wide-ranging interviews, conducted for Truthout by C. J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky discusses his views on the “war on terror” and the rise of neoliberalism; the refugee crisis and cracks in the European Union; prospects for a just peace in Israel/Palestine; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; the dysfunctional US electoral system; the grave danger posed to humanity by the climate crisis; and the hopes, prospects and challenges of building a movement for radical change.

Through the stories of prisoners and their families, including her own family’s experiences, Maya Schenwar shows how the institution that locks up 1.8 million Americans and decimates poor communities of color is shredding the ties that, if nurtured, could foster real collective safety. Looking toward a future beyond imprisonment, Schenwar profiles community-based initiatives that successfully deal with problems through connection rather than isolation, moving toward a safer, freer future for all of us.

After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, acclaimed Truthout journalist Dahr Jamail returned to the U.S. to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis — from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest — in order to discover and document the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.

In this book, Truthout writers William Rivers Pitt and Dahr Jamail provide the definitive history of what happened to Iraq, why it happened and who is responsible. From Pitt’s early reporting on the ultimate motivations behind the Iraq invasion, to Jamail’s unembedded reporting from Iraq as the occupation ground on, to the detailed breakdown of every lie we were told to justify this war, and the serial naming of those who had a hand in it — this book is the period at the end of a long, bleeding sentence.

A former senior editor at Truthout, the late William Rivers Pitt skewers the Bush administration for its reckless invasions, warrantless wiretaps, lethally incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and other scandals and blunders, while refuting the claim that no one could foresee the costs and dangers of those failed policies in a collection of must-read 33 essays.

William Rivers Pitt’s caustic critique of the American government in the wake of 9/11 gives voice to the growing tide of dissent and outrage with the U.S.’s leaders, both inside the country and in the wider world. Burning with anger, this incisive and readable book argues that under George W. Bush, the U.S. made a mockery of the values of liberty and truth that it purports to stand for, and how important it is to speak out against such mendacity.

The definitive debunking of the arguments used by President George W. Bush and his advisors for a war on Iraq. Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Truthout journalist William Rivers Pitt dismantle the myths surrounding Iraq’s weapons capabilities to uncover the disturbing forces behind the U.S.’s push for war.