In the 1950s in southwest Philadelphia, two movements fought for the protection of marshland and the people who lived on it. Only one succeeded. Will Caverly’s Tinicum & Eastwick tells the story of a racially integrated community threatened by “urban renewal”—at the time the largest redevelopment project in the United States—and the citizens who fought the city’s attempts to demolish their homes. Meanwhile, conservationists organized to protect the habitats of birds and other wildlife from highway construction and industrial pollution, eventually establishing America’s first urban wildlife refuge. Caverly’s book, with its compassionate portraits of Eastwick residents and thorough analysis of local politics, considers “what responsibilities a community has to its residents, human and nonhuman.”
Tinicum & Eastwick
Environmental Justice and Racial Injustice in Southwest Philadelphia
Will Caverly
Brookline Books
$24.95 | 288 pp.
*
Donald Trump’s pledge to conduct mass deportations in his second term may well uncover a hidden social contract at the heart of American life: that the steady flow of cheap food on our grocery shelves and at the drive-through window depends on the quiet, gruesome work of immigrants. Alice Driver’s new book takes readers inside life at a Tyson Foods factory in rural Arkansas through interviews with a group of immigrants suing Tyson over improper working conditions. Driver distinguishes herself from an all-too-familiar cottage industry of media about factory farming. Even more than a story about meatpacking, Life and Death of the American Worker is about the confluence of regulatory capture, decades of de-unionization in legacy industries, and the vulnerability of immigrants, documented or otherwise, pushed to the underground of American life.
Life and Death of the American Worker
The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
Alice Driver
Atria/One Signal Publishers
$28.99 | 272 pp.
*
I am tired of defining and redefining the consequences of a warming planet. I am tired of the narrow, inadequate political conversation on the subject, which barely touches the slow-motion emergency spilling over into every aspect of our lives. It was a delight, then, to dive into Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book of interviews, What If We Get It Right? She tackles topics from financing green energy to kelp farming, international sustainable development to journalism, climate rom-coms to the water cycle. Each interview walks us through what it would really take not just to avert catastrophe, but to build and sustain something better and more beautiful than the world we inhabit now.
What If We Get It Right?
Visions of Climate Futures
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
One World
$34 | 496 pp.
