"An unforgettable portrait of the tectonic shifts happening in rural China -- told through the microcosm of one small town. After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration,...

"A powerful memoir by Nury Turkel lays bare China's repression of the Uyghur people. Turkel is cofounder and board chair of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. In recent years, the People's Republic of China has rounded up as many as three million Uyghurs, placing them in what it calls "reeducation camps," facilities most of the world identifies as concentration camps....

Story of a mostly forgotten crusader for Black and women's rights, Ida B. Wells Barnett, born in slavery on a plantation in Mississippi. She very effectively used the press and the written word to sway public opinion on matters from post civil war lynching to rights for women and helping secure freedom for supposed perpetrators of the Arkansas race riots. Toni Morrison reads passages from Ida's memoirs as part of the way the story is told.

"Misty Copeland made history as the first African-American principal ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre. Her talent, passion, and perseverance enabled her to make strides no one had accomplished before. But as she will tell you, achievement never happens in a void. Behind her, supporting her rise was her mentor, Raven Wilkinson, who had been virtually alone in her quest to breach the all-white ballet world when she fought to be taken seriously...

"In the wake of the Obama presidency, a group of young charismatic conservatives catapulted onto the American political and cultural scenes, eager to thwart nationwide pushes for greater equity and inclusion. They dreamed of a cultural revolution-online and off-that would offer a forceful alternative to the progressive politics that were dominating American college campuses. In Raising Them Right, a gripping, character-driven read and investigative...

"In grocery store aisles and kitchens across the country, smiling images of 'Aunt Jemima' and other historical and fictional black cooks can be found on various food products and in advertising. Although these images are sanitized and romanticized in American popular culture, they represent the untold stories of enslaved men and women who had a significant impact on the nation's culinary and hospitality traditions even as they were forced to prepare...

A Traditional Eskimo Whaling Crew Races for shore near Barrow, Alaska, while their comrades drift out to sea: ice that should be solidly anchored at this time of year is giving way. Elsewhere, a team of scientists with frosty beards traverses the breadth of Alaska, measuring the thinning snow every ten kilometers in an effort to understand albedo, the heat-deflecting property that helps regulate the planet's temperature. Climate change isn't an abstraction...

Describes efforts to educate urban youngsters through writing

"This graphic memoir by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning offers a deeply personal meditation on the "the talk" parents must have with Black children about racism and the brutality that often accompanies it, a ritual attempt to keep kids safe and prepare them for a world that-to paraphrase Toni Morrison-does not love them. Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't play with a white friend's realistic...

Looks at the roles of American women in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in the feminist movement, in the workplace, the family, and sports, and in the stereotypes in the magazines, television shows, and films of the time.