At 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET on the first Wednesday of every month, you can spend an hour asking your questions of the author of one of the most useful recent books for progressive activism. We’ll post information about each upcoming book and author here well ahead of time, to give you a chance to acquire and read the book beforehand. This is a free public service open to all.
September 3, 2025
Join us for the September 2025 online book club on September 3 at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET with George Yancy, author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. The event is free, but it’s up to you to buy the book or borrow it from a friend or library.
About the Book
“Black Bodies, White Gazes is academically rigorous, elegantly written, and theoretically sophisticated, and Yancy is to be commended for this examination of discursive practices of whiteness in everyday life.”—MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Discover a clear and dynamic phenomenological framework of race to the history and most recent headlines in social justice and race relations, including coverage of police murders and brutality against Black Americans and the rise of white nationalism.
New to the third edition:
- Chapter introductions and discussion questions from philosopher Taine Duncan
- A chapter giving critical phenomenological attention to contemporary anti-Black violence against individuals such as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Sonya Massey, and Kayla Moore
- A new coda featuring the author’s interview with photographer Daniel C. Blight
About the Author
George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college’s highest honors. Yancy has published over 250 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites. He is especially known for his numerous essays and conducted interviews at both the New York Times’ philosophy column The Stone, and at Truthout. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 25 books. Yancy’s most recent books include the third edition of his authored book, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025). He is also coeditor (with philosopher A. Todd Franklin) of the book, Open Casket: Philosophical Meditations on the Lynching of Emmett Till (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025). Yancy is editor of the Philosophy of Race Book Series at Bloomsbury Publishing.
Buy the Book
Buy the book here, or at your local book store. Get a discount with this flyer.
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October 1, 2025
Join us for the October 2025 online book club on October 1 at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET with Mariah Blake, author of They Poisoned the World. The event is free, but it’s up to you to buy the book or borrow it from a friend or library.
About the Book
“Riveting and horrifying . . . Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time [is] a book that none of us can afford to miss.” –The Washington Post
They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals by journalist Mariah Blake is a landmark investigation of the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis.
In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to one hundred million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery came as a shock to most, the U.S. government and the manufacturers of these toxic chemicals—used in everything from lipstick and cookware to children’s clothing—had known about their hazards for decades.
They Poisoned the World tells the astonishing story of this cover-up, tracing its roots back to the Manhattan Project and through the postwar years, as industry scientists discovered that these chemicals refused to break down and were saturating the blood of virtually every human being. By the 1980s, manufacturers were secretly testing their workers and finding links to birth defects, cancer, and other serious diseases. At every step, the industry’s deceptions were aided by our government’s appallingly lax regulatory system—a system that has made us all guinea pigs in a vast, uncontrolled chemistry experiment.
Drawing on years of on-the-ground reporting, interviews with more than two hundred people, and tens of thousands of documents, They Poisoned the World interweaves the secret history of forever chemicals with the moving story of how a lone village took on the chemical giants—and won. Blake personally witnessed this story unfolding through the lives of four village residents. During the eight years she spent following their remarkable journey, she accompanied them to hospital rooms, churches, dive bars, funeral homes, Little League games, and family dinners. She watched as they fought illness and grief and witnessed deeply emotional moments, including the birth of a child whose mother was all too aware of the chemical burden she had passed on.
As the crisis spread, first to neighboring towns and then to hundreds of municipalities across the country, Blake saw them band together with people from other affected communities, eventually taking their fight all the way to Capitol Hill. In the process, citizen activists across the country ignited the most powerful grassroots environmental movement since Silent Spring.
Humane and revelatory, They Poisoned the World will provoke outrage—and hopefully inspire the change we need to protect the health of every American for generations to come.
Praise for the Book
“Impeccably researched and outrageous both in the scope of [corporate] malfeasance and the efforts of those who support it, the narrative never strays from its relentless documentation of the generational price paid for our decades of lax regulation. A must-read.”–Booklist, starred review
“A crackling David vs. Goliath story . . . [Blake’s] impressive research provides damning evidence of PFAS manufacturers’ callous indifference. Readers will be outraged.” –Publishers Weekly
“The insidious compounds we now call ‘forever chemicals’ deserve a forever chronicle, and this is surely it. Mariah Blake has written the definitive account of a slow-motion catastrophe and the everyday heroes who fought to bring it to light.” –Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Toms River
“They Poisoned the World is a brilliant and damning investigation of the global chemical industry and the devious methods it employed to promote its risky products. While it is often an enraging book, it is not a despairing one. People in this story stand up, fight, and make a difference. In this troubled moment in our environmental history, that makes this book something exceptional—not just insightful but inspiring.” –Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poison Squad
“The story of a small town struggling with the global disaster that is ‘forever chemicals,’ They Poisoned the World is at once fascinating, enraging, and heartbreaking.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Under a White Sky
“They Poisoned the World is a powerful and big-hearted book about the hunt for an invisible killer that lives in your kitchen, your water, your clothes, and all around you. Reading it will scare the plastic out of your life. It will also fill you with awe for the courageous residents of a small town who fought against a corporate polluter and took on a powerful industry that is turning our world into a toxic synthetic stew.”—Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First
“In They Poisoned the World, Mariah Blake brilliantly overcomes one of the core challenges of environmental journalism—making everyday readers care about the invisible. The result is a poignant and pressing account of one of industrial society’s great secrets. We would do well to pay attention to the evidence that she has marshalled—countless lives are at stake.”—Clayton Page Aldern, author of The Weight of Nature
About the Author
Buy the Book
Buy the book here, or at your local book store.
Sign up to get the Zoom link
November 5, 2025
Join us for the November 2025 online book club on November 5 at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET with Greg Grandin, author of America, América. The event is free, but it’s up to you to buy the book or borrow it from a friend or library.
About the Book
A New York Times Bestseller.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
The story of how the United States’ identity was formed is almost invariably told by looking east to Europe. But as Greg Grandin vividly demonstrates, the nation’s unique sense of itself was in fact forged facing south toward Latin America. In turn, Latin America developed its own identity in struggle with the looming colossus to the north. In this stunningly original reinterpretation of the New World, Grandin reveals how North and South emerged from a constant, turbulent engagement with each other.
America, América traverses half a millennium, from the Spanish Conquest—the greatest mortality event in human history—through the eighteenth-century wars for independence, the Monroe Doctrine, the coups and revolutions of the twentieth century, and beyond. Grandin shows, among other things, how in response to U.S. interventions, Latin Americans remade the rules, leading directly to the founding of the United Nations; and how the Good Neighbor Policy allowed FDR to assume the moral authority to lead the fight against world fascism.
Grandin’s book sheds new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain; the Colombian Jorge Gaitán, whose unsolved murder inaugurated the rise of Cold War political terror, death squads, and disappearances; and the radical journalist Ernest Gruening, who, in championing non-interventionism in Latin America, helped broker the most spectacularly successful policy reversal in United States history. This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.
A culmination of a decades-long engagement with hemispheric history, drawing on a vast array of sources, and told with authority and flair, this is a genuinely new history of the New World.
Praise for the Book
“An extraordinarily ambitious book . . . America, América reads at times as the historical equivalent of the great epic novels of Gabriel García Márquez.” —Daniel Geary, The Mark Pigott Professor in U.S. History, Trinity College, for The Irish Times
“Historian Greg Grandin’s audacious new book . . . will, for many readers, upend conceptions of the hemisphere . . . each day’s headlines further confirm the deep-rooted patterns that his brilliant and urgently needed history traces . . . America, América pursues its course across the centuries with verve, superb pacing, and impressive delicacy of touch.” —Esther Allen, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A sweeping, magisterial analysis of 300 years of conflicting geopolitical understandings of sovereignty that have defined Anglo-American and Spanish American relations . . . The relevance of this history cannot be overemphasized.” —Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, The Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History, University of Texas, for Science
“Written with great flair and imagination, scattered with scintillating turns of phrase and pervaded with a sense of barely suppressed indignation.” —Anthony Pagden, University of California, Los Angeles, for The Literary Review
“Grandin has written a stirring new book… America, América shows how over the course of five centuries, America in the north and America in the south have shaped each other through war, conquest, competition and cooperation. Their intercontinental relationship has had implications for not only the Western Hemisphere but also the modern world . . . Grandin is such a terrific writer and perceptive historian that I was swept along by his enthralling narrative.” —The New York Times
“An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Scintillating . . . It’s a monumental new view of the New World.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Dazzling. Sweeping. Mind-altering. World-changing. This is a once-in-a-generation contribution destined to become our new reference for understanding the making of the modern world. With extraordinary depth, erudition and precision, Grandin avenges the dead and fights for the living.” —Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of Doppelganger
“For nearly a century, historians have attempted to tell a ‘common history’ of ‘Greater America,’ one that brings the history of the United States and Latin America together in a shared and durable conceptualization. In America, América, Greg Grandin does just this and advances an urgent vision of the relational history of the hemisphere. Adding to his already extraordinary corpus of works and reinterpreting five centuries in broad and beautiful strokes, it ends with a chilling conclusion about the diplomatic and moral failures of our current politics and its return to unilateralism and deliberate misunderstandings of the past. A major and desperately needed synthesis of the Americas and the making of modernity.” —Ned Blackhawk, author of National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America
“America, América is the best kind of book: masterful and erudite yet absolutely riveting. By considering the long, sweeping story of Latin America and the United States in the same frame, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin has given us a novel and necessary understanding of a deeply entwined history that is sure to surprise readers, not least because he shows convincingly and urgently how a different past—and with it a different, better present—might have been possible.”—Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cuba: An American History
“Greg Grandin’s America, América takes José Martí’s famous essay, ‘Nuestra América’ and recasts it as a sweeping historical epic. Here is Our American history, told as it never has been told before, full of staggering violence and loss, unforgettable villains and heroes, and the courageous endurance of the poor multitudes, so many sources of inspiration. Beautifully written, this brilliantly researched and reasoned book helps account for the sorry state of the present while offering historical lessons on how we might reach a better future.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Monkey Boy
“In this sweeping and provocative work, Greg Grandin provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the intertwined histories of the two Americas, foregrounding Latin American resistance to the hegemony of the United States. This is a compelling new vision of the relationship between the two continents.” —Amitav Ghosh, author of the bestselling Ibis Trilogy and Smoke and Ashes
“In his awe-inspiring masterpiece, Greg Grandin shows how hemispheric relationships have defined the history of the United States for five centuries. Latin Americans did more than decry our failures to live up to the new world’s revolutionary ideals. As our country ascended to hegemon in the last century, our neighbors pushed—in part because of their unequal might and wealth—for the reimagination of how the globe itself ought to be governed.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism Against Itself
About the Author
Greg Grandin is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.
He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic, first published in 2005 and significantly revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman.
He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Released in early 2014, The Empire of Necessity narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville’s other masterpiece, a short story titled “Benito Cereno.” Toni Morrison called this book “scholarship at its best,” a “deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry… brilliant.” Maureen Corrigan on NPR’s Fresh Air named The Empire of Necessity as the best book of 2014.
Grandin’s Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists, and Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009.
Timothy Rutten of the The Los Angeles Times writes of Fordlandia: “Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed . . . a marginal event. . . and turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industry’s contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all of that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told. . . Fordlandia is precisely that—a genuinely readable history recounted with a novelist’s sense of pace and an eye for character. It’s a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable.” The American Scholar says that “Grandin takes full command of a complicated narrative with numerous threads, and the story spills out in precisely the right tone—about midway between Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh.”
Grandin is also the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline. With Gil Joseph, Grandin co-edited A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War.
A former consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala, Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written for various journals, including The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, Jacobin, The Boston Review, and The Intercept. For The Nation, he has written obituaries for Gabriel García Márquez, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Cormac McCarthy, Henry Kissinger, and George H.W. Bush. He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and is very fond of Amy’s dog, Zazu.
Buy the Book
Buy the book here, or at your local book store.
Sign up to get the Zoom link
To recommend books/authors for the book club, send an email to david AT rootsaction DOT org.