Jamaal Bowman

Democratic nominee for #NY16. Former middle school principal. Causing problems for the status quo. Fighting for jobs and education, not bombs and incarceration.

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Book Recommendations:

JB

Recommended by Jamaal Bowman

Happy New Year! Sending love, peace, health and happiness to all. ❤️🙏🏿🖖🏿 Please drop a book recommendation for 2023. I recently finished a really good one. Thank you @mariaressa for your strength, truth and love for humanity. https://t.co/4mzD9JAsP6 (from X)

Introduction by Amal Clooney From the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, an impassioned and inspiring memoir of a career spent holding power to account. Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler. Harnessing the emerging power of social media, Rapplercrowdsourced breaking news, found pivotal sources and tips, harnessed collective action for climate change, and helped increase voter knowledge and participation in elections. But by their fifth year of existence, Rappler had gone from being lauded for its ideas to being targeted by the new Philippine government, and made Ressa an enemy of her country’s most powerful man: President Duterte. Still, she did not let up, tracking government seeded disinformation networks which spread lies to its own citizens laced with anger and hate. Hounded by the state and its allies using the legal system to silence her, accused of numerous crimes, and charged with cyberlibel for which she was found guilty, Ressa faces years in prison and thousands in fines. There is another adversary Ressa is battling. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is also the story of how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Philippines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by the social media companies. Ressa exposes how they have allowed their platforms to spread a virus of lies that infect each of us, pitting us against one another, igniting, even creating, our fears, anger, and hate, and how this has accelerated the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world. She maps a network of disinformation—a heinous web of cause and effect—that has netted the globe: from Duterte’s drug wars to America's Capitol Hill; Britain’s Brexit to Russian and Chinese cyber-warfare; Facebook and Silicon Valley to our own clicks and votes. Democracy is fragile. How to Stand Up to a Dictator is an urgent cry for Western readers to recognize and understand the dangers to our freedoms before it is too late. It is a book for anyone who might take democracy for granted, written by someone who never would. And in telling her dramatic and turbulent and courageous story, Ressa forces readers to ask themselves the same question she and her colleagues ask every day: What are you willing to sacrifice for the truth?

JB

Recommended by Jamaal Bowman

I had the honor of writing the forward for this amazing book entitled Radical Care written by my mentor and scholar Dr. Rosa Rivera-Mccutchen. The book is for school leaders but Radical care is what the world needs now more than ever. Let us take this healing journey together. https://t.co/CUI3YDh2aX (from X)

Radical Care: Leading for Justice in Urban Schools book cover

by Rosa L. Rivera-McCutchen, Jamaal A. Bowman·You?

Educators often invoke the term care to describe why they entered the field and what compels them to continue. This book argues that care, as typically described and enacted, is not sufficient for leading schools, particularly those serving Black and Latinx children. Instead, school leaders need to embrace radical care. Drawing from 20 years of researching and working in New York City public schools, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen outlines the five components of radical care: adopting an antiracist stance, cultivating authentic relationships, believing in students’ and teachers’ capacity for excellence, leveraging power strategically, and embracing a spirit of radical hope. To demonstrate practical strategies, the author shares vignettes from her personal experiences that exemplify each of the components. Calling for today’s school leaders to thoughtfully challenge existing structures that reproduce inequality, Radical Care offers a much-needed framework that will guide leadership practice with a sense of urgency and a spirit of hope. Book Features: Focuses on the school principal as critical catalyst for school transformation.Centers antiracism as essential to leadership practice.Includes practical strategies for navigating the sociopolitical and policy climate.Offers a roadmap for engaging teachers and staff in practicing radical care.

JB

Recommended by Jamaal Bowman

Check out the amazing “Winning The Green New Deal” book by @VarshPrakash and @guidogir with chapters from @rgunns, @alexandrasiera, @_waleedshahid, @RevDrBarber, @MaryKayHenry, @cwabobmaster, @jnoisecat, @KateAronoff, @NaomiAKlein, and more! https://t.co/vfCRCUcpFl (from X)

Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can book cover

by Varshini Prakash, Guido Girgenti·You?

An urgent and definitive collection of essays from leaders and experts championing the Green New Deal—and a detailed playbook for how we can win it—including contributions by leading activists and progressive writers like Varshini Prakash, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Bill McKibben, Rev William Barber II, and more. In October 2018, scientists warned that we have less than 12 years left to transform our economy away from fossil fuels, or face catastrophic climate change. At that moment, there was no plan in the US to decarbonize our economy that fast. Less than two years later, every major Democratic presidential candidate has embraced the vision of the Green New Deal—a rapid, vast transformation of our economy to avert climate catastrophe while securing economic and racial justice for all. What happened? A new generation of leaders confronted the political establishment in Washington DC with a simple message: the climate crisis is here, and the Green New Deal is our last, best hope for a livable future. Now comes the hard part: turning that vision into the law of the land. In Winning a Green New Deal, leading youth activists, journalists, and policymakers explain why we need a transformative agenda to avert climate catastrophe, and how our movement can organize to win. Featuring essays by Varshini Prakash, cofounder of Sunrise Movement; Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Green New Deal policy architect; Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize–winning economist; Bill McKibben, internationally renowned environmentalist; Mary Kay Henry, the President of the Service Employees International Union, and others we’ll learn why the climate crisis cannot be solved unless we also confront inequality and racism, how movements can redefine what’s politically possible and overcome the opposition of fossil fuel billionaires, and how a Green New Deal will build a just and thriving economy for all of us. For anyone looking to understand the movement for a Green New Deal, and join the fight for a livable future, there is no resource as clear and practical as Winning the Green New Deal.