What We Are Reading Today: Bending Toward Justice

Updated 28 March 2019
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What We Are Reading Today: Bending Toward Justice

  • An account of a key moment in America’s struggle for equality

Bending Toward Justice is a dramatic and compulsively readable account of a key moment in America’s struggle for equality, related by an author who played a major role in these events. 

A distinguished work of legal and personal history, the book is destined to take its place as a canonical civil rights history.

The book provides an inside look at how author Doug Jones, a former US attorney from Birmingham, and his role model, the former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley, sent to prison three Birmingham Klansmen who murdered four black girls by dynamiting their church on Sept. 15, 1963. 

The four children, aged 11 to 14 — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris Wesley — died instantly in a women’s restroom where they were preparing for Sunday school.

Without Jones and Baxley, both white men born in Alabama and educated in the state’s law schools, the murders of the children killed on that “bloody Sunday” would have gone forever unpunished.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Little Book of Beetles’

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Updated 27 April 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Little Book of Beetles’

Author: ARTHUR V. EVANS

Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile any nature lover. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with color photographs and original color artwork, “The Little Book of Beetles” is an accessible and enjoyable mini-reference about the world’s beetles, with examples drawn from across the globe.

It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics — from anatomy, diversity, and reproduction to habitat and conservation.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets

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Updated 26 April 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets

  • Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones

Author: Kimberly Kay Hoang

In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe.
Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled more than 350,000 miles and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals. She traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, and how it finds its way into risky markets onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar.

Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones.

Dazzlingly written, Spiderweb Capitalism sheds critical light on how global elites capitalize on risky frontier markets, and deepens our understanding of the paradoxical ways in which global economic growth is sustained through states where the line separating the legal from the corrupt is not always clear.

 


What We’re Reading Today: Work Life Well-lived

Updated 25 April 2024
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What We’re Reading Today: Work Life Well-lived

Author: Kelly Mackin

This book will disrupt how you think about creating your best work life and workplace and give you a road map to get you there, says a review published on goodreads.com.

Through years of research and truth-finding, Kelly Mackin and her company, Motives Met, have discovered a completely new mindset and approach around what well-being at work is all about, how to get there, and why it’s so important that we do get there.

This book is a personal guide and a call to action for a shift in our approach to work.


What We Are Reading Today: Natural Magic

Updated 25 April 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Natural Magic

Author: Renee Bergland 

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls.

The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts.

“Natural Magic” intertwines the stories of these two luminary 19th-century minds whose thought and writings captured the awesome possibilities of the new sciences and at the same time strove to preserve the magic of nature.


What We Are Reading Today: Frogs of the World: A Guide to Every Family

Updated 24 April 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Frogs of the World: A Guide to Every Family

Authors: Mark O’Shea & Simon Maddock

With more than 7,600 known species, frogs exhibit an extraordinary range of forms and behaviors, from those that produce toxins so deadly that they could kill a human many times over to those that can survive being frozen in ice.

“Frogs of the World” is an essential guide to this astonishingly diverse group of animals. An in-depth introduction covers everything from the origins and evolution of frogs to their life cycles and defense strategies.