Thursday, December 27, 2018

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2018

Please Note: The following list of books is not organized according to any personal hierarchy of the relative value of each individual book. Rather it is a list that seriously considers ALL of the books listed here to be of equal intellectual and cultural value and interest, albeit for different reasons. The bottomline on this list is that each one of these books is extraordinary and invaluable in their own right and represents some of the very best writing published in the United States in 2018.

--Kofi Natambu, Editor

Looking For Lorraine:  The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
by Imani Perry
Beacon Press,  2018
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
by David W. Blight
Simon and Schuster,  2018
American Nightmare:  Facing the Challenge of Fascism
by Henry A. Giroux
City Lights Books,  2018
Ruth Bader Ginsberg:  A Life
by Jane Sherron Hart
Knopf,  2018
Reporter:  A Memoir
by Seymour M. Hersh
Knopf,  2018
Alienation and Freedom
by Frantz Fanon
(Edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young)
Bloomsbury Academic,  2018
Arthur Ashe:  A Life
by Raymond Arsenault
Simon and Schuster,  2018
The Russian Revolution:  A View From the Third World
by Walter Rodney
(Edited by Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse J. Benjamin}
Verso,  2018
An American Odyssey:  The Life and Work of
Romare Bearden
by Mary Schmidt Campbell
Oxford University Press,  2018
A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
by Jeanne Theoharis
Beacon Press,  2018
Playing Changes: Jazz For the New Century
by Nate Chinen
Pantheon Books,  2018
An African American and Latinx History of
the United States
by Paul Ortiz
Beacon Press,  2018
 
One Person, No Vote:  How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy
by Carol Anderson
Bloomsbury, 2018
The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela
by Nelson Mandela
(Edited by Sahm Venter)
W. W. Norton,  2018
The Heritage:  Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism
by Howard Bryant
Beacon Press,  2018
The New Negro:  The Life of Alain Locke
by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Oxford University Press,  2018
Algiers, Third World Capital:  Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers
by Elaine Mokhtefi
Verso,  2018
The Struggle Is Eternal:
Gloria Richardson and Black Liberation
by Joseph R. Fitzgerald
University Press of Kentucky,  2018
Outside Agitator:  
The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr.
by Adam Parker
Hub City Press,  2018
Vexy Thing:  On Gender and Liberation
by Imani Perry
Duke University Press,  2018


 
HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Fear: Trump in the White House
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster,  2018

To Shape A New World:  Essays on 
the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Edited by Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry
Harvard University Press,  2018
 
Smoketown:  
The Untold Story Of The Other Great Black Renaissance
by Mark Whitaker
Simon and Schuster,  2018
 
Invisible:  The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster
by Stephen L. Carter
Henry Holt and Company, 2018
The Global Imagination of 1968:  
Revolution and Counterrevolution
by George Katsiaficas
PM Press,  2018
What Truth Sounds Like:  RFK, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America
by Michael Eric Dyson
St. Martin’s Press,  2018
Eloquent Rage:  
A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
by Brittney Cooper
St. Martin’s Press,  2018

Making All Black Lives Matter:  
Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Cebtury
by Barbara Ransby
University of California Press,  2018

May We Forever Stand:  A History of the Black National Anthem
by Imani Perry
The University of North Carolina Press,  2018


I Got To Keep Moving:  Stories 
by Bill Harris 
Wayne State University Press,  2018

Friday, March 9, 2018

The Ruthless Domination of Wall Street and Casino Capitalism in the U.S. and the Shameless Complicity of the Republican and Democratic Parties in its Ongoing Rule