Why am I passionate about this?
I am a professor of history at College of DuPage, a community college outside of Chicago. Growing up in New York City and rural Vermont in the 1980s and 1990s around people who questioned everything made me think a lot about how and why the social world is organized in such an obviously unjust and irrational way. I have tried to understand the development of this organization ever since.
Sam's book list on why takes on the police miss the real problem
Why did Sam love this book?
Taibbi lays bare the overlapping problems of poverty, policing, mass incarceration, the Democratic Party, and modern protest politics by tracing the life, murder, and movement surrounding Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a police officer on the streets of New York in 2014.
Whatever you think of Taibbi, this book has one of the clearest explanations I have ever read of how a logical and well-meaning idea can become its opposite. “Broken windows theory” began as the idea that keeping cities clean and their residents free from harassment can make people feel safer and more invested in where they live.
In the abstract, this makes sense. But in the context of the massive attacks on the working class, and the black part of the working class in particular, the application of this theory by New York politicians and police officials led to the widespread “social rape” of young…
1 author picked I Can't Breathe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'A brilliant work of narrative nonfiction' - Booklist
'Matt Taibbi is one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power' - Bernie Sanders
'A searing expose' - Kirkus Review
'Taibbi may be the only political writer in America that matters' - Hartford Advocate
The incredible story of the death of Eric Garner, the birth of the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement and the new fault lines of race, protest, policing and the power of the people.
On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died in New York after a police officer put him in…
- Coming soon!