Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
By: Mychal Denzel Smith
4.37
Format: 208 pages, Hardcover
Winner of the 2020 Kirkus Prize for NonfictionBrave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is …
Want to Read $ 10.99"Individual safety and prosperity at the expense of solidarity can only ever replicate capitalist hierarchies and the violent means imposing them. If you view your emancipation as separate from mine, we will forever be locked in an unwinnable competition."-Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
If you liked the nonfiction plot in Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream by Mychal Denzel Smith , here is a list of 20 books like this:
1. October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
By: China Miéville
3.82
Format: 736 pages, Hardcover
In February 1917, in the midst of bloody war, Russia was still an autocratic monarchy: nine months … read more
Want to ReadSimilar categories in China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
2. Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America
By: Michael Harriot
4.59
Format: 432 pages, Hardcover
From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly… read more
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- race
- history
- politics
- nonfiction
- social justice
- african american
- audiobook
3. Wandering Stars
By: Tommy Orange
3.89
Format: 315 pages, Hardcover
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Pulitzer Prize-finalist Tommy Orange’s breakout best seller There … read more
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- adult
- audiobook
"And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical …"-Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars
4. Chain-Gang All-Stars
By: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
4.14
Format: 367 pages, Hardcover
Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far… read more
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- adult
- audiobook
"They were all humans, and yet they had completely different ideas about what humanity meant."-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
"My brother-in-law is an alien. I have a bunch of alien friends. I can't be racist," Randy Mac continued."-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
"An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,"-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
"...despite how hard it was, she wasn't afraid with love. She knew how to wield it, how to grow it, and how to receive it."-Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars
5. Martyr!
By: Kaveh Akbar
4.24
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves… read more
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- audiobook
6. Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
By: Antonia Hylton
4.27
Format: 368 pages, Hardcover
In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crowns… read more
Want to Read $ 16.99Similar categories in Antonia Hylton's Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- race
- history
- nonfiction
- social justice
- african american
- audiobook
7. Easy Beauty
By: Chloé Cooper Jones
4.12
Format: 272 pages, Hardcover
From Chloé Cooper Jones—Pulitzer Prize finalist, philosophy professor, Whiting Creative Nonfiction … read more
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- nonfiction
- essays
- audiobook
"Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth."-Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty
"Maybe then I would submit to it's rigid ideals if I were recognized as worthy of experiencing them."-Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty
"I care if you are happy. I'm in love with your happiness. My focus is on how you feel not what you do."-Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty
"You could have made me come home," I say. "No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to."-Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty
8. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
By: Shoshana Zuboff
4.06
Format: 691 pages, Hardcover
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unpre… read more
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- history
- politics
- nonfiction
- sociology
- audiobook
"This is the existential contradiction of the second modernity that defines our conditions of existence: we want to exercise control over our own lives, but everywhere that control is thwarted. Indivi…"-Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
9. A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
4.60
Format: 301 pages, Hardcover
A stirring meditation on Black performance in America from the New York Times bestselling author of… read more
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- race
- history
- nonfiction
- essays
- african american
- audiobook
"When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure."-Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
"If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to the grave."-Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
"I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing... I don't mean to prop up the idea of wanting an exit, but for me, not to imagine it as…"-Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
"Of the many things America loves to pat itself on the back about, one of the things is an obsession with exploration, or the desire to seek places beyond the places you are from or the places you hav…"-Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance
10. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
By: Melissa Febos
4.24
Format: 171 pages, Paperback
Memoir meets craft masterclass in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful” exploration of … read more
Want to Read $ 11.99Similar categories in Melissa Febos's Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- nonfiction
- essays
- audiobook
"Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many"-Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
"...The more we believe we ought to be something that we are not, the more money we will spend in that mission."-Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
"Every single thing I have created worth a damn has been a practice of love, healing, and redemption. I know this process to be divine."-Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
"I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define."-Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative
11. Florida
By: Lauren Groff
3.77
Format: 275 pages, Paperback
The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its lan… read more
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- adult
- audiobook
"All things nauseating and deadly are American, apparently. Well, okay, she can't disagree."-Lauren Groff, Florida
"She's a novelist, which is tantamount to being a one woman card catalogue for useless knowledge."-Lauren Groff, Florida
"Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting to learn this of herself."-Lauren Groff, Florida
"She is exhausting to everyone. She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn't have that option."-Lauren Groff, Florida
12. There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
4.40
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—f… read more
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- race
- nonfiction
- essays
- audiobook
"Heartbreak itself is a primary color. Stagnant without a series of secondary colors to activate it. Longing is an activator."-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
"With enough repetition, anything can become a religion. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, it simply matters if a person returns."-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
"It is a strange miracle to be able to trace your own aging, your own mortality through someone who's living alongside you, someone who has survived eras at the same time as you have in some of the sa…"-Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
13. The Sun Walks Down
By: Fiona McFarlane
3.74
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-ye… read more
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- adult
- audiobook
14. The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
By: Janice P. Nimura
3.59
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
Elizabeth Blackwell believed from an early age that she was destined for a mission beyond the scope… read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Janice P. Nimura's The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- nonfiction
- history
- audiobook
15. Witches
By: Brenda Lozano
3.52
Format: 240 pages, Hardcover
A remarkable novel by one of the most exciting new voices in Latin America today This is the sto… read more
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- audiobook
16. The Alternatives
By: Caoilinn Hughes
3.48
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
“A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for ou… read more
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- audiobook
17. Riot Baby
By: Tochi Onyebuchi
3.72
Format: 167 pages, Kindle Edition
Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor's son murdered … read more
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- race
- adult
- audiobook
"When you have a purpose that doesn't involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk."-Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby
"Look at outside. We don't have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can't remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My church-goers can come and go in peace." "When there isn't a curfe…"-Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby
18. When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era
By: Donovan X. Ramsey
4.36
Format: 448 pages, Hardcover
A kaleidoscopic account of the crack cocaine era and a community’s ultimate resilience, told throug… read more
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- race
- history
- politics
- nonfiction
- social justice
- sociology
- audiobook
19. The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
By: Jeff Sharlet
4.02
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
An unmatched guide to the religious dimensions of American politics, Jeff Sharlet journeys into cor… read more
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- history
- politics
- nonfiction
- essays
- sociology
- audiobook
20. Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
By: Camonghne Felix
3.83
Format: 240 pages, Hardcover
When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything… read more
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- adult
- nonfiction
- audiobook
"It is through living, then dying, and living to die again that we discover what being alive is supposed to mean at all."-Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
"Pythagoreans believed that there are three ways humanity improves, one of which is dying. Death is biological, but where it is also metaphysical is where I find delight."-Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
"Math is a form of faith, a faith of its own dynamic and complex language system, and to speak it is to agree to its principles: Input begets output. One becomes the other. One variable is subject to …"-Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
"Nobody has to care about what hurts you because that's not their job. It's not the world's job to understand you, it's your job to understand the world. And the more you understand it, the more you l…"-Camonghne Felix, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation
21. Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
By: Natasha Trethewey
4.25
Format: 213 pages, Hardcover
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot… read more
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- race
- adult
- nonfiction
- african american
- audiobook
"Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?"-Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
"To survive trauma one must be able to tell a story about it."-Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
"For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--n…"-Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
"My whole life people have wondered "what" I am, what race or nationality. ... It's happened again and again: someone looking at me furtively, or calling me "exotic" and asking me "What's your heritag…"-Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
22. The Undying
By: Anne Boyer
4.16
Format: 320 pages, Paperback
A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggr… read more
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- nonfiction
- essays
"Amnesia is vice-president to pain and the mother of philosophy."-Anne Boyer, The Undying
"You will understand, I hope, that because of all of this, every pink ribbon looks like the flag of a conqueror stuck in a woman's grave."-Anne Boyer, The Undying
"As soon as a patient lies down on the exam table, she has laid down her life on a bed of narrowed answers, but the questions are never sufficiently clear."-Anne Boyer, The Undying
"A person who complains about any aspect of breast cancer treatment in public is often drowned out by a chorus of people, many of whom have never had cancer, accusing her of ingratitude, saying she is…"-Anne Boyer, The Undying
23. We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
By: Sally Adee
4.10
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that ru… read more
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- nonfiction
- history
- audiobook
24. Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
By: Rachel Maddow
4.35
Format: 434 pages, Kindle Edition
In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of M… read more
Want to Read $ 4.99Similar categories in Rachel Maddow's Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- politics
- history
- nonfiction
- audiobook
"A trained Soviet KGB operative then heading its successor outfit, the FSB, Putin had done the sitting Russian president the memorable favor of successfully derailing the criminal investigation into t…"-Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
"It's easy to look back on those strange days at the end of September 2003 and identify the warnings signs about Putin and Russia that American policy makers missed. But it would be unfair to them, an…"-Rachel Maddow, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
25. A History of Burning
By: Janika Oza
4.14
Format: 400 pages, Hardcover
An epic, sweeping historical debut novel spanning continents and a century, and how one act of surv… read more
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- adult
- audiobook
"What was love but one long act of forgiveness, of choosing to return, over and over again."-Janika Oza, A History of Burning
26. The Night Parade
By: Jami Nakamura Lin
4.28
Format: 352 pages, Hardcover
In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeousl… read more
Want to Read $ 12.99Similar categories in Jami Nakamura Lin's The Night Parade book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- nonfiction
- audiobook
27. Another Word for Love: A Memoir
By: Carvell Wallace
4.35
Format: 272 pages, Hardcover
A transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for hea… read more
Want to Read $ 14.99Similar categories in Carvell Wallace's Another Word for Love: A Memoir book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- race
- nonfiction
- social justice
- audiobook
28. Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul
By: Evette Dionne
3.94
Format: 272 pages, Hardcover
A poignant and ruthlessly honest journey through cultural expectations of size, race, and gender--a… read more
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- race
- nonfiction
- essays
- audiobook
"What might change if we simply minded our body's business, and thought about other people's less?"-Evette Dionne, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul
"I refuse to settle... it would be nice to find a partner, but I'd much rather remain single than settle for someone that's undeserving."-Evette Dionne, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul
"Our culture treats weight loss as if it's about aesthetics or a vain quest to assimilate, but we rarely consider that it is sometimes a consequence of traumatic experience."-Evette Dionne, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul
"When I look in the mirror, I don't see a body slimmed through strict dieting and weight loss. I see a body that's weary, that's battered, that has been through absolute hell. I see a body that's resi…"-Evette Dionne, Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul
29. Everywhere You Don't Belong
By: Gabriel Bump
3.69
Format: 264 pages, Hardcover
In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable pro… read more
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- race
- african american
- audiobook
"If there’s one thing wrong with people,"-Gabriel Bump, Everywhere You Don't Belong
30. Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
By: Mychal Denzel Smith
4.37
Format: 208 pages, Hardcover
Winner of the 2020 Kirkus Prize for NonfictionBrave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is … read more
Want to Read $ 10.99Similar categories in Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- race
- history
- politics
- adult
- nonfiction
- social justice
- essays
- african american
- sociology
- audiobook
"Individual safety and prosperity at the expense of solidarity can only ever replicate capitalist hierarchies and the violent means imposing them. If you view your emancipation as separate from mine, …"-Mychal Denzel Smith, Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
31. Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life
By: Natasha Lennard
4.03
Format: 144 pages, ebook
An urgent challenge to the prevailing moral order from one of the freshest, most compelling voices … read more
Want to Read $ 7.99Similar categories in Natasha Lennard's Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life book and Mychal Denzel Smith's Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream
- politics
- nonfiction
- social justice
- essays
