Politics

First Few Pages: Caste

Posted on August 20, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Isabel Wilkerson explores caste systems across civilizations and the eight pillars that underlie them — including divine will, bloodlines, stigma and more. This powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior, even the nation's fate. Using riveting stories of people — from Martin Luther King Jr.'s to her own, and many others' — Wilkerson shows the ways caste is experienced every day.

First Few Pages: How Democracies Die

Posted on June 25, 2020| Posted in First Few Pages

Drawing on decades of research and a wide range of historical and global examples, from 1930s Europe to contemporary Hungary, Turkey, and Venezuela, to the American South during Jim Crow, Levitsky and Ziblatt show how democracies die—and how ours can be saved.