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17 posts from June 2014

Freedom, Equality, & Publishing the Garrity Decision: A Conversation with Bookseller Marshall Smith

By Tom Hallock | I first became manager of Coolidge Corner’s Paperback Booksmith (now the Brookline Booksmith) back in 1978, just four years after Judge W. Arthur Garrity’s historic decision to integrate the Boston School District through the “forced busing” of students, as it later became known. It was a time when the fallout over that decision was still shaking the communities of Boston, and a time I revisited when Beacon first published Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls, a powerful account of what it was like to be a young man growing up in Southie during the time when busing came to that neighborhood. Read more →


Long before the board of American Apparel decided to fire founder and CEO Dov Charney for ethical misconduct, Fran Hawthorne had come to the same conclusion. In an excerpt from her award-winning book 'Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love,' Hawthorne profiles the problematic former head of American Apparel, and the long history of ethical lapses that provided the framework for his latest fall. Read more →


Drawing on his years as a dedicated community activist and on the experiences of LGBT parents, Michael Shelton puts together a few concrete strategies culled from his book 'Family Pride' that LGBT families can use to intervene in and resolve difficult community issues, teach their children resiliency skills, and find safe and respectful programs for them. Read more →


In an excerpt from 'All Souls: A Family Story from Southie,' Michael Patrick MacDonald writes about the firestorm of racial tension that spread throughout South Boston in the wake of Judge W. Arthur Garrity’s forced busing decision, leading up to the tempestuous autumn when Garrity’s plan was set to begin. Read more →


'Among Chimpanzees' is at once an inspiring chronicle of Nancy J. Merrick’s personal search to learn how chimps are faring across Africa and in captivity, a crucial eyewitness account of a very critical period in their existence, and a rousing call for us to join the efforts to be a voice for the chimpanzees, before it’s too late. Read more →


As Father’s Day approaches, we’ve been thinking of books we’d recommend to our own fathers. Here are five titles that share a deep interest in the world, or that tell the story of fatherhood itself, with all its memories and complexities and sometime revelations. If your father is anything like ours, we're sure he would take any of these books, find a quiet place to sit, and then read every word. Read more →


By Fran Hawthorne #495311811 / gettyimages.com Of all the problems the world confronts today, climate change undoubtedly affects more people, with more potentially dire consequences, than any other single issue. Yet most people, looking at the EPA regulation that President... Read more →


A Massachusetts resident celebrates the state's progressive leadership, how it became a beacon of hope for the marriage equality movement, and, while she's at it, dispels some LGBT myths with Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, and Michael Amico, authors of “You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People. Read more →


In his new memoir 'Love & Fury,' acclaimed poet and writer Richard Hoffman reflects on his upbringing in a post-World War II blue-collar family, coming to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited. At the book’s core are the author’s questions about boyhood, fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, and about the changing meaning of what it means to be a good man in America. Read more →


Dr. Carole Joffe—author of 'Doctors of Conscience: The Struggle to Provide Abortion before and after Roe v Wade' and 'Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients and the Rest of Us'—remembers Dr. George Tiller, the late-term abortion provider who was assassinated five years ago, and examines the abortion situation in Kansas in the post-Tiller era. Read more →