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 2017.
--Kofi Natambu, Editor
Message To Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago
by Paul Steinbeck
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Epistrophes: Jazz and the Literary Imagination
by Brent Hayes Edwards
Harvard Universary Press, 2017
We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 2017
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America
by Nancy MacLean
Viking, 2017
The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit
by Scott Kurashige
University of California Press, 2017
Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
by Elaine M. Hayes
Ecco Press, 2017
A Colony In A Nation
by Chris Hayes
W.W. Norton & Company, 2017
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein
Liveright Publishing Corporation (A Division of W.W. Norton & Company), 2017
Chester B. Himes: A Biography
by Lawrence P. Jackson
W. W. Norton & Company
Class, Race, and Marxism
by David Roediger
Verso, 2017
Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
by James Q. Whitman
Princeton University Press, 2017
Futures of Black Radicalism
Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin
Verso, 2017
The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom In The City Of The Straits
by Tiya Miles
The New Press, 2017
Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Penguin Press, 2017
Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
by Andrea J. Ritchie
Beacon Press, 2017
Policing the Black Man
Edited by Angela J. Davis
Pantheon Books, 2017
NO Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics And Winning The World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Haymarket Books, 2017
Race and America’s Long War
by Nikhil Pal Singh
University of California Press, 2017
True South: Henry Hampton and Eyes On The Prize, the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement
by Jon Else
Viking, 2017
Black Detroit: A People’s History Of Self-Determination
by Herb Boyd
Amistad, 2017
How To Kill A City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight For The Neighborhood
by Peter Moskowitz
Nation Books, 2017
Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Bloomsbury, 2017
Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield
by Todd Mayfield with Travis Atria
Chicago Review Press, 2017
The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War ii
by John W. Dower
Haymarket Books, 2017
Insane Clown President:
Dispatches From the 2016 Circus
by Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau, 2017
The Blood of Emmett Till
by Timothy B. Tyson
Simon & Schuster, 2017
Ali: A Life
by Jonathan Eig
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017
Battles For Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History
by Eric Foner
I.B. Tauris & Co. and the Nation Books, 2017
James Baldwin: The FBI File
Edited by William J. Maxwell
Arcade Publishing, 2017
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
by China Miéville
Verso, 2017
