New Releases: African History and Women’s Healthcare

Hossain grew up in Bangladesh, and never thought that she would almost die in childbirth in the United States, but she almost did. In this new release, she discusses how this experience “put her on a journey to explore, understand, and share how women—especially women of color—are dismissed to death by systemic sexism in American healthcare.” This is important!

The Howards! Just makes me remember how great Arrested Development is. Ron and his brother Clint’s memoir looks at their childhood on TV, including Andy Griffith and Happy Days. Kim and I were just talking about how dual memoirs can be so good because you get these two perspectives on what was going on and gets you a little closer to a true picture. Exciting.

I’m gonna throw some numbers at you: in the 1920s, American’s consumed 75% of the world’s rubber (primarily by having most of the cars), but America controlled 1% of the rubber supply. So, “to solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic” and turned it into America’s rubber empire through exploitation and environmental devastation. This is one of those things you don’t hear about, but which had a huge impact.

Law professor Hessick talks about “he unstoppable march of plea bargaining, which began to take hold during Prohibition and has skyrocketed since 1971, when it was affirmed as constitutional by the Supreme Court.” Read about the case against plea bargaining and how it can be reformed.

The history of Africa “has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity?” Author French is a professor at Columbia and was one of the New York Times‘s first Black correspondents, covering West and Central Africa in the ’90s. I am SUPER psyched for this book; there are not enough African history books published in the US.