"While visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955, Emmett Till allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter of a crossroads country store. Her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped the fourteen-year-old Chicago kid in the middle of the night and tortured, beat, and shot him. Three days later, his body rose from the Tallahatchie River, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Confronting her son's nightmarishly disfigured...

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, this "is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices--from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin--to help explain the roots of [what he sees as] our moral erosion as a people"--

Just as Donald Trump's victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious "Alt-Right" leaders mystifies many. But the extreme Right has been growing steadily in the US since the 1990s, with the rise of patriot militias. Following 9/11, conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black president...

"[Katrina] completely transformed one of the most beloved cities in America, leaving nearly 80 percent of New Orleans flooded and damaging 134,000 housing units, causing unprecedented destruction. The response to Katrina is a topic of unending debate and anger ... Watching coverage of the hurricane on television in 2005 ... Roberta Brandes Gratz knew that the best chance for the city's recovery came from the people who would return to New Orleans....

"Policing Black Bodies goes beyond chronicling isolated incidents of injustice to look at the broader systems of inequality in our society-- how they're structured, how they harm Black people, and how we can work for positive change. The book discusses the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and the prison boom, the unique ways Black women and trans people are treated, wrongful convictions and the challenges of exoneration, and more. Each...