(December 9, 2020) It’s our favourite list of the year. Books we think you’d like for yourself to catch up on reading over the holidays, or something special and unique for someone special in your life. It’s a diverse list—books that will take you face-to-face with wolves and bears of the natural kind, coupled with the what we think are definitive and striking books about race, technology, justice and even a 13-year-old Métis time traveller. We’ve reviewed a lot of books this year. Here is The Charity Report Literary Circle’s Top 10 books of 2020 in chronological order.
1. The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth, Samuel Woolley, Public Affairs, January 7, 2020, 272 pp. $28.67 | For charities trying to make effective choices around social media, the information in this book allows them to see that work through the framework of human rights and democracy as opposed to likes, re-tweets and hashtags. Woolley says he sees the future of organizing not in grassroots community organizing, but in "astroturf" organizing—falsely generated political organizing, with corporate or other powerful sponsors, that is intended to look like real community based (grassroots) activism. (Reviewed by Gail Picco January 14, 2020)
2. Northwest Resistance: A Girl Called Echo (Volume 3), Katherena Vermette; Scott B. Henderson, Donovan Yaciuk, Illustrators, Highwater Press, February 25, 2020, 48 pp., $18.76 | Echo Desjardin is no ordinary 13-year-old Métis girl. Living with new family and attending a new school, worry and sadness lie heavily on her shoulders and, like Superman, she is a motherless child, having lost her mother in childbirth. History is her favourite subject. Her playlist is loaded with songs by the band Rage Against the Machine. Echo is also a time traveller. (Reviewed by Gail Picco March 6, 2020)
3. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot, Mikki Kendall, Viking, February 25, 2020, 288 pp., $28.45 | “A one-size fits-all approach to feminism is damaging, because it alienates the very people it is supposed to serve, without ever managing to support them. For women of color, the expectation that we prioritize gender over race, that we treat the patriarchy as something that gives all men the same power, leaves many of us feeling isolated.” (Reviewed by Nicole Salmon March 29, 2020)
4. Soul Full of Coal Dust – A Fight for breath and justice in Appalachia, Chris Hamby, Little, Brown and Company, August 18, 2020, 448 pp., $32.32 | Soul Full of Coal Dust is a Pulitzer-prize winning riveting account that is part memoir, part medical and legal thriller, part underdog takes on the Goliath of systemic injustice. With devastating clarity, it exposes the corruption, fraud, and medical, legal, and corporate malpractice that has denied miners and their families the life support and medical care that is their due. (Reviewed by Sharon Broughton September 12, 2020)
5. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, Random House, August 4, 2020, 336 pp., $35.65 | “The world is awash with bullshit, and we’re drowning in it. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Silicon Valley startups elevate bullshit to high art. College and universities reward bullshit over analytic thought. The majority of administrative activity seems to be a little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.” (Reviewed by Wanda Deschamps November 4, 2020)
6. Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love, edited by Nneka Allen, Camila Vital Nunes Pereira and Nicole Salmon, Gail K. Picco Books, Civil Sector Press, November 24, 2020, 227 pp., $39.99 CAD/$29.99 USD | “Collecting Courage is the first and only book that is brave enough to expose the poison that pervades our institutions, corrupts the corridors of power, fuels hate amongst its people, and allows injustice to flourish. But that’s not its endgame. Each writer, by laying bare their pain, also expresses a special resilience through which they find love for oneself and community, create a space for healing, and invite everyone to rebuild a sector that sees its own truth and potential.” (Reviewed by Krishan Mehta November 26, 2020)
7. Takaya: Lone Wolf, Cheryl Alexander, foreword Carl Safina, Rocky Mountain Books, September 29, 2020, 192 pp., $29.70 | “Takaya’s life was very odd for a wolf,” writes Carl Safina in his forward to Takaya: Lone Wolf. “Wolves are very social. They usually live in families, just as we humans do. Takaya came, alone, to a small island without food or reliable fresh water. Yet this unusual, mysterious, different wolf found his way to survive, for years.” (Reviewed by Gail Picco December 2, 2020)
8. Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and the Urgent Lessons for our Own, Eddie Glaude Jr, Crown, June 30, 2020, 272 pp., $33.78 | “What Glaude today—and Baldwin in his time—both understand is that the commitment to take down the structures of racism cannot overestimate the generosity of white people and their willingness to change white structures that benefit them every day of their lives. It will take sheer numbers of Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, people of colour, and coalitions with supporters to gain the political power to make the necessary gains.” (Reviewed by Gail Picco November 30, 2020)
9. When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Roger Martin, Harvard Business Review, September 29, 2020, 256 pp., $30.66 | “Despite the economic adversity described in its pages, this book manages to create hope and possibility by devoting the final chapters to solutions. It had me sitting in my car in the parking lot at my son’s soccer practice googling whatever happened to Wells-Fargo and Canada’s own French’s Ketchup—epic stories. This book, ironically, left me wanting more.” (Reviewed by Ginelle Skerritt December 7, 2020)
10. What Bears Teach Us, Sarah Elmeligi, Photographs: John E. Marriott, Rocky Mountain Books, October 29, 2020, 224 pp., $45.00 | The result of this formidable author/photographer combination is a coffee-table size hardcover that gives you a fact-filled and joyous rendering of bears’ lives and current accounting of our relationship with them. It is part of the catalogue of Rocky Mountain Books, a bounty of singular books that, no matter how you might categorize your current interests, you will find yourself hungry for a type of food you didn’t know existed. (Reviewed by Gail Picco December 9, 2020)