All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement
Carlotta R. Anderson. Chronicles the life and work of the prominent Detroit labor leader, anarchist and poet (1850-1933).

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives
Debra E. Bernhardt, Rachel Bernstein. A pictorial history of working people in New York City.

Pit of Infamy
Bill Yund. The illustrated story of the 1909 Pressed Steel Car Company Strike at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

What Sid Did
Bill Yund. The illustrated story of Sid Hatfield of Matewan. Also includes the Battle of Homestead.

Work & Labor: A History in Story & Song from the Stone Age to the Information Age
Judy Gail. A creative textbook for junior high & high school.

Digger Blues
Jim Ray Daniels. 14 poems about Digger, a middle-aged factory worker.

The Quiet Sickness: a Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America
25 years of photographs by Earl Dotter . Foreword by Robert Coles.

Singing Back: The 1990s in Song and Narrative
Paul McKenna. Songs, mostly parodies, tell the story of the Oregon Public Employees Union, SEIU Local 503 during the turbulent decade of the Nineties.

Not For Bread Alone
Moe Foner. A Memoir by Moe Foner with a foreword by Ossie Davis.

Labor's Troubadour
Joe Glazer. The LHF founder and Chair recounts his fifty years of musical adventures in labor and politics. Includes lyrics to 70 songs.

Tin Men
Archie Green.An exploration of the art and tradition of tinsmiths.

Calf's Head & Union Tales
Archie Green. Labor folk tales and oral traditions.

Packinghouse Daughter
Cherie Register. Winner of the American Book Award. A unique memoir capturing the lost history of a Midwestern town.

Ballad of an American: the Autobiography of Earl Robinson
Earl Robinson with Eric A. Gordon. Life-and-times story of the composer who wrote the immortal labor song "Joe Hill".

Portraits in Steel
Photographs by Milton Rogovin ; interviews by Michael Frisch. A powerful documentation in images and words of the experiences of a dozen men and women who lost their jobs in the steel mills in Buffalo, NY.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone: a Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies
Pete Seeger. Autobiography.

i, Se Puede! Yes, We Can
Diana Cohn, with illustrations by Francisco Delgado. Bilingual children's story honoring the 8000 L.A. Janitors who went on strike in 2000. For children ages 6-10.

Remembering Cesar: The Legacy of Cesar Chavez
Compiled by Ann McGregor ; edited by Cindy Wathen ; photographs by George Elfie Ballis . 46 firsthand accounts by those who knew Cesar Chavez best with beautiful black and white photographs of the farmworker movement.

Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers
Michael K. Honey.

Black Workers Remember: Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, & Freedom Struggle
Michael K. Honey.

New Titles

Summer Reading:  Books for the Beach, the Mountains, or Your Favorite Chair

Here’s a sampling of new book titles for you to check out this summer: Mother Jones, Labor Leader; Generation Debt; Exporting America; Conned; and award wining fiction like Found Fathers, Union Dues, and the Newberry children’s book about the strike for the 8 hour day, Bread and Roses.

Mother Jones Labor Leader
By Connie Colwell Miller
Available August 2006

Union Dues
By John Sayles

The setting is Boston, Fall 1969. Radical groups plot revolution, runaway kids prowl the streets, cops are at their wits end, and work is hard to get, even for hookers. Hobie McNutt, a seventeen year old runaway from West Virginia drifts into a commune of young revolutionaries. It's a warm, dry place, and the girls are very available. But Hobie becomes involved in an increasingly vicious struggle for power in the group, and in the mounting violence of their political actions. His father Hunter, who has been involved in a brave and dangerous campaign to unseat a corrupt union president in the coal miners union, leaves West Virginia to hunt for his runaway son. To make ends meet, he takes day-labor jobs in order to survive while searching for him. Living parallel lives, their destinies ultimately movingly collide in this sprawling classic of radicalism across the generations, in the vein of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and Richard Price.

Generation Debt
By Anya Kamenetz

In this thoroughly researched and rousing manifesto, Anya Kamenetz chronicles and questions the plight of the new "youth class": 18 — to 29-year-olds who are drowning in debt and therefore seemingly unable to "grow up." Many older adults perceive today's youth as immature slackers, "twixters," or "boomerang kids," who simply cannot get their act together, but Kamenetz argues that this perception is a misinformed stereotype.  How will we get ourselves out of this mess? By analyzing and explaining the causes of this phenomenon, Kamenetz demonstrates the urgent need for people to begin investing in our nation's youth. Generation Debt will get you thinking in new ways about American values — and America's future.

Conned
By Sasha Abramsky

More than four million Americans, mainly poor, black, and Latino, have lost the right to vote. In some states, as many as a third of all African American men cannot take part in the most basic right of a democracy. The reason? Felony disenfranchisement laws, which remove the vote from people while they are in prison or on parole, and, in several states, for the rest of their lives.  Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky takes us on a journey through disenfranchised America, detailing the revival of antidemocratic laws that came of age in the post-Civil War segregationist

Bread and Roses, Too
By Katharine Paterson

Rosas mother is singing again, for the first time since Papa died in an accident in the mills. But instead of filling their cramped tenement apartment with Italian lullabies, Mamma is out on the streets singing union songs, and Rosa is terrified that her mother and older sister, Anna, are endangering their lives by marching against the corrupt mill owners. From a beloved, award-winning author, here is a moving story based on real events surrounding an infamous 1912 strike.

The Mind at Work
By Mike Rose

Society makes sweeping judgments about the intelligence of the "common worker." But consider the lightning-fast calculations required of any waitress; the complex spatial mathematics of the carpenter; the hairdresser’s ability to turn a client’s vague description into a real hairdo. Ditto the skills and brainpower involved in being an electrical worker, a welder and more. In this impassioned and insightful book, Mike Rose reveals the intellectual skills that physical labor requires and assesses the costs – educational, economic and societal – of ignoring them.  Combining the latest research in the cognitive and social sciences with the voices of working people, Rose offers a brilliant, original portrait of America at work.
"An eloquent tribute to our working men and women... It knocked me out."
STUDS TERKEL, AUTHOR OF WORKING

Exporting America
By Lou Dobbs

Business reporter and commentator Lou Dobbs is a self-identified "lifelong Republican" who "believe(s) deeply in our free-enterprise democracy. I’m a capitalist." All of which makes Dobbs’ indictment of the exporting of American jobs just that much more powerful.

The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
By Louis Uchitelle

This compelling, highly-readable book traces the rise and fall of job security in the United States and comes away with the conclusion that government must step in with policies that encourage companies to restrict layoffs and generate new jobs. The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business reporter for the New York Times, makes clear the ways in which layoffs are counterproductive and rarely promote long-term efficiency or profitability. The job losses are ravaging the country and its middle class, he says.

The Known World
By Edward P. Jones

Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected conn

Kira-Kira
By Cynthia Kadohata

In Cynthia Kadohata's lively, lovely, funny and sad novel -- winner of the 2005 Newbery Medal -- the Japanese-American Takeshima family moves from Iowa to Georgia in the 1950s when Katie, the narrator, is just in kindergarten. Though her parents endure grueling conditions and impossible hours in the non-unionized poultry plant and hatchery where they work, they somehow manage to create a loving, stable home for their three children: Lynn, Katie, and Sammy. Katie's trust in, and admiration for, her older sister Lynn never falters, even when her sisterly advice doesn't seem to make sense. Lynn teaches her about everything from how the sky, the ocean, and people's eyes are special to the injustice of racial prejudice. Small moments shine the brightest in this poignant story; told beautifully and lyrically in Katie's fresh, honest voice.

Death at the Haymarket 
By James Green

The bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) "radicals and reformers" and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others. Labor historian Green (Taking History to Heart) eloquently chronicles all this, producing what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation. reserved.

Black Americans and Organized Labor:  A New History
By Paul D. Moreno

Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation—truly a "new history"—of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating relevant biographical details of principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph.

January 1905 
By Katharine Boling

This novel offers a close look at the harsh realities of life in a mill town during the early 20th century. The story centers on 11-year-old sisters, each envious of the other's "easy" life. Arlene, who was born with a "monster foot," is lonely tending house while Pauline works at the cotton mill with the rest of the family and other children. In alternate chapters, the twins narrate their parallel experiences. The story has a strong message about walking in another person's shoes. When Pauline injures her foot, she learns what it is like for her sister to live with a deformity. Arlene fills in at the mill for the injured boy and finds that there is no end to sweeping and lint. In the end, the girls recognize that their best opportunity for friendship is between themselves.

Orange County Housecleaners
By Frank Cancian

Orange County Housecleaners documents the lives of seven women who make their livings cleaning houses in Orange County, California. Of the seven, five are Latina immigrants and two are Orange County natives. Sara Velazquez came to the United States alone when the youngest of her four children was ten, and found ways to get all of them and her husband from Mexico to Orange County. Sharon Risley earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1990--twenty-six years after a teenage pregnancy destroyed her plans to go from high school to art school. Mimi Lopez was alone on Thanksgiving 1985 when her twin daughters were born in the Miami home where she worked as a nanny. Each chapter combines a woman's life story told in her own words with Frank Cancian's recent photos of her family, work, and other activities.

It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics
By Franscesca Polletta

Activists and politicians have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. In early 1960 four black college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. Within a month sit-ins spread to thirty cities in seven states. Student participants told stories of impulsive, spontaneous action—this despite all the planning that had gone into the sit-ins. “It was like a fever,” they said. Francesca Polletta’s It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements.

Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassrotts, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
By Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitas Zuniga

Here's what you need to know. Kos and Jerome are lefties who built two of the most interesting communities on the "Internets." Their book isn't about liberal policies; it's about how and why the Democrats and liberals, whose individual policies are preferred by most Americans, nevertheless keep losing elections. The compelling answer has to do much more with a total lack of organization and infrastructure within the party and the movement, than it does with substantive ideology.


Coming On Home Soon  
By Jacqueline Woodson, E.B. Lewis
 
Set during World War II. Ada Ruth waits for the return of her mother, who left home in search of a job. "They're hiring colored women in Chicago since all the men are off fighting in the war." Perfectly matched words and illustrations masterfully bring to life all the emotions that the girl is experiencing as she, her grandmother, and a stray kitten that has come to stay all try to comfort and console one another. …A tender, heartfelt story that will touch readers

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