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Noname Book Club Selections 2021

Launched in the summer of 2019 by Chicago rapper Noname, the book club picks two titles a month to discuss both online and in-person in discussion groups around the country. Described as “reading material for the homies”, Noname Book Club highlights books that speak on human conditions in critical and original ways while encouraging members to support the works of authors of color.

Showing 1 - 9 of 9  There are a total of 23 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "As long as grass grows"
Star rating for As long as grass grows
Description:
"Interrogating the concept of environmental justice in the U.S. as it relates to Indigenous peoples, this book argues that a different framework must apply compared to other marginalized communities, while it also attends to the colonial history and structure of the U.S. and ways Indigenous peoples continue to resist, and ways the mainstream environmental movement has been an impediment to effective organizing and allyship"--
Book cover for "Belly of the beast"
Star rating for Belly of the beast
Description:
"An exploration of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness at the intersections of race, police violence, gender identity, fatness, and health"--
Book cover for "Cane"
Star rating for Cane
Book cover for "Facing the rising sun"
Star rating for Facing the rising sun
Description:
The surprising alliance between Japan and pro-Tokyo African Americans during World War II In November 1942 in East St. Louis, Illinois a group of African Americans engaged in military drills were eagerly awaiting a Japanese invasion of the U.S.-- an invasion that they planned to join. Since the rise of Japan as a superpower less than a century earlier, African Americans across class and ideological lines had saluted the Asian nation, not least because...
Book cover for "Looking for Lorraine"
Star rating for Looking for Lorraine
Description:
"A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet least understood, Black artists and intellectuals of the twentieth century" -
Book cover for "Monster"
Star rating for Monster
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.
Book cover for "No name in the street"
Star rating for No name in the street
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
This stunningly personal document and extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies displays James Baldwin's fury and despair more deeply than any of his other works. In vivid detail he remembers the Harlem childhood that shaped his early conciousness, the later events that scored his heart with pain--the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, his sojourns in Europe and in Hollywood, and his retum to the American South to...
Book cover for "This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed"
Star rating for This nonviolent stuff'll get you killed
Description:
"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. One of King's advisors remembered the reverend's home as "an arsenal." Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection-yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get...
Book cover for "The three mothers"
Star rating for The three mothers
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary...