Civil Rights & Civil Liberties

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The Shame of the Nation

The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

By Jonathan Kozol

Jonathan Kozol examines the renewed racial segregation of American public schools and the unequal educational conditions accompanying it. Drawing on visits to nearly sixty schools, especially in large urban systems, he combines classroom observation, conversations with children and educators, historical reflection, and policy criticism. His argument extends beyond disparities in buildings or budgets: racially isolated schools are often subjected to rigid discipline, scripted instruction, relentless test preparation, reduced arts and humanities offerings, and assumptions about children’s future economic roles that affluent communities would resist. The book places these conditions against the unfulfilled promise of Brown v. Board of Education and challenges claims that standards and accountability can compensate for unequal opportunities. Its central concern is moral as well as institutional: what does a democracy reveal about itself when it accepts profoundly different forms of school…

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Small Boat

By Vincent Delecroix , Helen Stevenson

Small Boat is a short, urgent novel by French philosopher and novelist Vincent Delecroix, rendered into English by Helen Stevenson. Based on the November 2021 English Channel disaster in which an overloaded dinghy capsized and twenty-seven migrants died, the book is narrated by a fictionalized version of the radio operator who received the distress calls. Structured in three parts—her interrogation, the drowning of the passengers, and her life after the event—the novel interrogates individual and collective responsibility, the banality of bureaucratic indifference, and the structural forces that drive people to risk their lives at sea. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and winner of an English PEN Translates award, it is the first of Delecroix's novels to appear in English.

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Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

By Isabel Wilkerson

In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson argues that American racism is sustained by a deeper architecture of inherited social ranking. She uses “caste” to describe a system that assigns status, authority, vulnerability, and presumed worth according to ancestry and group membership, whether or not individual participants consciously endorse it. Her main focus is the United States, but she develops the argument through comparisons with caste in India and Nazi Germany’s racial order. Historical episodes, reported encounters, biographical portraits, and experiences from Wilkerson’s own life show how hierarchy operates through law, custom, violence, etiquette, and ordinary assumptions. The book organizes these mechanisms into eight recurring pillars, including heredity, endogamy, dehumanization, occupational hierarchy, and enforcement through terror. Its central challenge is to look beyond personal prejudice and examine the durable social structure that teaches people where they supposedly belong—and w…