Monday, December 27, 2021

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS OF 2021

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 2021

—Kofi Natambu, Editor



Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition

by Joshua Myers

Polity Press,  2021


Selected Writings On Marxism

by Stuart Hall

Duke University Press,  2021


Selected Writings On Race and Difference

by Stuart Hall

Duke University Press,  2021


The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, IlenaSilverman, and Jake Silverstein

Project created by Nikole Hannah-Jones

One World,  2021

The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story Of The Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement
by V.P. Franklin
Beacon Press, 2021

AntiBlackness
Edited by Moon-Jie Jung and Joao H. Costa Vargas
Duke University Press, 2021

White Malice:
The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa
by Susan Williams
PublicAffairs, 2021

Race, Rights, and Redemption:
The Derrick Bell Lectures On The Law And
Critical Race Theory
Edited by Janet Dewart Bell and Vincent M. Southerland
The New Press, 2021

The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader:  

Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses

Edited by Jordana Moore Saggese

University of California Press,  2021

 

The Trees:  A Novel

by Percival Everett

Graywolf Press,  2021


Presumed Guilty:
How The Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights
by Erwin Chemerinsky
Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2021
Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response To The Pandemic That Changed History
by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damien Paletta
Harper, 2021
Consequences Of Capitalism:
Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance
by Noam Chomsky and Mary Waterstone
Haymarket Books, 2021
America On Fire:
The Untold History Of Police Violence And

Black Rebellion since the 1960s

by Elizabeth Hinton

Liveright/W.W. Norton,  2021

The Cruelty Is The Point:
The Past, Present, And Future of Trump’s America

by Adam Serwer

One World,  2021

White Freedom: The Racial History Of an Idea
by Tyler Stovall

Princeton University Press,  2021

Border And Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, 
and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

by Harsha Walia

Haymarket Books,  2021

The Matter of Black Lives: Writing From The New Yorker
Edited by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
University of California Press, 2021

Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, And A History Of Erasure And Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Beacon Press,  2021


Until I Am Free:  

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message To America

by Keisha N. Blain

Beacon Press, 2021



HONORABLE MENTIONS:


The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

Library of America,  2021


A Little Devil in America:  

Notes in Praise of Black Performance

Hanif Abdurraqib

Random House, 2021


Black Ivy:  A Revolt in Style

by Jason Jules and Graham Marsh

Reel Art Press,  2021


Time To Teach:  

A History Of The Southern Civil Rights Movement

by Julian Bond

Edited by Pamela Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis

Photographs by Danny Lyon

Beacon Press, 2021 


Becoming Abolitionists:  

Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

by Derecka Purnell

Astra House,  2021


The Second:  

Race And Guns In A Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

Bloomsbury Publishing,  2021


Abolition For the People:  

The Movement For A Future Without Policing and Prisons

Edited by Colin Kaepernick

Kaepernick Publishing,  2021


Four Hundred Souls:  

A Community History Of African America,  1619-2019

Edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain

One World,  2021

 

The Stone Face

by  William Gardner Smith

New York Review BooksPress,  2021

(Originally published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus)

 

You Made Me Love You:  Selected Stories,  1981-2018

by John Edgar Wideman

Scribner,  2021


The New Age Of Empire:  

How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule The World

by Kehinde Andrews

Bold Type Books,  2021

 

Just As I Am

By Cicely Tyson (w. Michelle Burford)

HarperCollins,  2021

 

Bob Thompson:  This House Is Mine

Edited by Diana Tuite

Colby College Museum Of Art

Waterville, Maine

Yale University Press, 2021

 

THE PANOPTICON REVIEW PRESENTS TWENTY OUTSTANDING BOOKS ANNUALLY FROM 2010-2021

PLEASE CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUAL LINKS TO ACCESS THE LISTINGS OF EACH CALENDAR YEAR:













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