To read our JWJ reviews of these books, just click on our Book Review Index and find the book alphabetically by author.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah: A Novel (New York: Anchor Books, 2013), 588pp.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010, 2012 revised edition), 312pp.
Without Sanctuary; Lynching Photography in America, with introductory essays by James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 209pp.
Maya Angelou, Maya Angelou; The Complete Poetry (New York: Random House, 2015), 308pp.
Maya Angelou, Mother; A Cradle to Hold Me (New York: Random House, 2006), 32pp.
Paul Beatty, The Sellout; A Novel (New York: Picador, 2015), 289pp.
Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson, Harry Belafonte: My Song (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 469 pp.
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half: A Novel (New York: Riverhead, 2020), 343pp.
Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower; A History of Black America, 1619 - 1962 (New York: Penguin, 1993, sixth revised edition), 736pp.
Emily Bernard, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 218pp.
Bertice Berry, The Ties That Bind; A Memoir of Race, Memory, and Redemption (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 205pp.
Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise, editors, The Long Walk to Freedom; Runaway Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 248pp.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 152pp.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Water Dancer: A Novel (New York: One World, 2019), 403pp.
LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, Her Honor: My Life on the Bench... What Works, What's Broken, and How to Change It (New York: Celadon, 2021), 309pp.
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 169pp.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845).
William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 448pp.
Peter Eichstaedt, Consuming the Congo; War and Conflict Minerals in The World's Deadliest Place (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2011), 232pp.
Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure; Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 326pp.
Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Montgomery: The Equal Justice Initiative, 2017 third edition), available online at eji.org.
Agnes Fallah Kamara-Umunna and Emily Holland, And Still Peace Did Not Come: A Memoir of Reconciliation (New York: Hyperion, 2011), 302pp.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering; Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 346pp.
Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 238pp.
Leymah Gbowee, with Carol Mithers, Mighty Be Our Powers, A Memoir: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War (New York: Beast Books, 2011), 246pp.
Gary Geddes, Drink the Bitter Root: A Search for Justice and Healing in Africa(Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), 232pp.
Peter Godwin, The Fear; Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 371 pp.
Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (New York: Liveright, 2021), 148pp.
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families; Stories From Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998).
Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth (New York: Metropolitan, 2019), 369pp.
Melissa Fay Greene, There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children (Bloomsbury 2006), 472 pp.
Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Herald Press, 2016), 189pp.
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains; Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 468pp.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 402pp.
Gwen Ifill, The Breakthrough; Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 277pp.
Debby Irving, Waking Up White And Finding Myself in the Story of Race (Cambridge: Elephant Room Press, 2014), 273pp.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
Margo Jefferson, Negroland; A Memoir (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015), 248pp.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 366pp.
Nikole Hannah Jones, The 1619 Project : A New Origin Story (New York: One World, 2021), 590pp.
Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: Random, 2019), 305pp.
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Hachette, 2016), 583pp.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love (1963), multiple editions.
Mitch Landrieu, In the Shadow of Statues; A White Southerner Confronts History (New York: Viking, 2018), 227pp.
Beverly Lowry, Harriet Tubman, A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 418pp.
Manning Marable, Malcolm X; A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 594pp.
Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 396pp.
Terry McAuliffe, Beyond Charlottesville: Taking a Stand Against White Nationalism (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019), 192pp.
Jon Meacham, His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope (New York: Random, 2020), 354pp.
Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa; From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair: A History of 50 Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 752pp.
Toni Morrison, God Help the Child: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2015), 178pp.
Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 114pp.
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (New York: Random House, 2016), 304pp.
Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 199pp.
Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations; A People's History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), 237pp
David S. Reynolds, Mightier Than the Sword; "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Battle for America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 351pp.
Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 254pp.
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), 342pp.
Charles Henry Rowell, editor, Angles of Ascent; A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 617pp.
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic; The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020), 396pp.
David Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York: Knopf, 1997), 62007pp.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 353pp.
Randy J. Sparks, Where The Negroes Are Masters; An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 309pp.
Jason K. Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters; The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 380pp.
Brian Steidle, The Devil Came on Horseback; Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 230pp.
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 368pp.
Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), 304pp.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir (New York: The New Press, 2018), 248pp.
Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850).
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2017), 289pp.
Mervyn Warren, King Came Preaching (Downers Give: InterVarsity, 2001), 223pp.
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 318pp.
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 224pp.
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 306pp.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House. 2020), 476pp.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns; The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), 622pp.
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone: A Novel (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 196pp.
Kevin Young, editor, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (New York: The Library of America, 2020), 1110pp.
Dan Clendenin: dan@journeywithjesus.net
