Amanda Ripley

Panelist: “How Can Our Communities Escape Polarizing Conflict?“

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
From the Publisher: That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.

High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently.

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Keri Blakinger

Moderator: “What Would The End Of Mass Incarceration Mean For Prison Towns?“

Corrections in Ink: A Memoir
From the Publisher: Keri Blakinger always lived life at full throttle. Growing up, that meant throwing herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice.

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John M. Eason

Panelist: “What Would The End Of Mass Incarceration Mean For Prison Towns?“

Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation
From the Publisher: For the past fifty years, America has been extraordinarily busy building prisons. Since 1970 we have tripled the total number of facilities, adding more than 1,200 new prisons to the landscape. This building boom has taken place across the country but is largely concentrated in rural southern towns.

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Ali Noorani

Speaker: “Could Immigration Unite Americans?“

Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants
From the Publisher: In an era when immigration on a global scale defines the fears and aspirations of Americans, Crossing Borders presents the complexities of migration through the stories of families fleeing violence and poverty, the government and nongovernmental organizations helping or hindering their progress, and the American communities receiving them.

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Manuel Pastor

Panelist: “Can California Solve Its Air Quality Inequality?“

Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter
From the Publisher: In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust and sustainable economy. They argue that our current economy is already deeply dependent on mutuality, but that the inequality and fragmentation created by the status quo undermine this mutuality and with it our economic well-being. They outline the theoretical framing, policy agenda, and social movements that we need to revive solidarity and apply it to whole societies.

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Michael Patrick F. Smith

Short List: “2022 Zócalo Book Prize“

The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown
From the Publisher: Like thousands of restless men left unmoored in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, Michael Patrick Smith arrived in the fracking boomtown of Williston, North Dakota five years later homeless, unemployed, and desperate for a job. Renting a mattress on a dirty flophouse floor, he slept boot to beard with migrant men who came from all across America and as far away as Jamaica, Africa and the Philippines. They ate together, drank together, argued like crows and searched for jobs they couldn’t get back home.

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Edward Slingerland

Short List: “2022 Zócalo Book Prize“

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
From the Publisher: Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders.

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Sam Quinones

Short List: “2022 Zócalo Book Prize“

The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
From the Publisher: Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders.

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Heather McGhee

Short List: “2022 Zócalo Book Prize“

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
From the Publisher: Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy—and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all.

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Caitlin Donahue Wylie

Panelist: “Can Dinosaur Fossils Make Science More Accessible?“

Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work behind the Scenes
From the Publisher: Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In this book, Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers.

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