THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION
BY GRACE LEE BOGGS & SCOTT KURASHIGE
University of California Press, 2011

“What time is it on the clock of the world?” If you’ve seen Grace Lee Boggs speak, you’ve likely heard her raise this question. In her new book co-authored with Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, the 95-year-old activist offers some answers—proceeding to lay out in six essays an assessment of what stage we are at in our evolution as a species and her vision for a more human and humane century.

POOR PEOPLES PLANET
BY MANDEEP SETHI
http://mandeepsethi.bandcamp.com, 2011

With an unmistakably laid-back West Coast hip-hop sound, 22 year-old Mandeep Sethi brings us Poor Peoples Planet—an album that is dynamic, and often incendiary while maintaining mellow Bay Area vibes. The San Francisco-based Sikh rapper—inspired by the gypsy hip-hop teachings of the crew Xitanos Matematikos, and the history of gypsies from Punjab—flows over meditative and haunting melodies and samples that are not typical for a hip-hop record.

On February 2, I attended a forum at the Fordham Institute titled “Are Bad Schools Immortal?” One of the speakers was Jeanne Allen, founder and president of the Center for Education Reform, which promotes “school choice,” a.k.a. charter schools and vouchers.

MEDITATIONS ON FRANTZ FANON’S WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
BY JAMES YAKI SAYLES
Kersplebedeb and Spear and Shield Publications, 2010

For more than twenty years, James Yaki Sayles (also known as Atiba Shanna) was one of the most profound theorists writing from within US prisons. Yaki turned his decades of confinement into a time to theorize and a place to strategize, working to maintain connections between what was happening inside prisons and what was happening outside of them.