THE FRIDAY LIST

Every week, new books and eBooks are arriving at RLB Library! Below are a few highlighted titles that are placed in the 1st floor leisure reading kiosk. There you’ll also find past The Friday List titles, but there are many more that we just don’t have room to show off. The last 30 days of new arrivals are listed at the bottom of this post, where you’ll be sure to find something to read for class assignments, your own personal enrichment, or just to have some fun!

The containment : Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the battle for racial justice in the North, by Michelle Adams, 2025

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit’s students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Emotions in the digital world : exploring affective experience and expression in online interactions, edited by Robin L. Nabi & Jessica Gall Myrick, 2023

The 21st century has seen rapid and profound technological innovations that have fundamentally changed our media environment. Our now unlimited access to information, entertainment, and social interaction is simply unprecedented. It is undeniable that this new media landscape impacts important aspects of our daily experiences – how we spend our time, who we connect with, what we know about each other and the world around us. But at a deeper level, this newer, digitized media age influences a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human: our emotional experiences. Given the centrality of emotions to both psychological and physical well-being, as well as to shaping human behavior, understanding how our current media environment impacts our emotional experiences – in ways both helpful and harmful – is critical to understanding the role media use plays in emotional development, life experiences, and societal events.

New prize for these eyes : the rise of America’s second civil rights movement, by Juan Williams, 2025

Soldiers and kings : survival and hope in the world of human smuggling, by Jason De León, 2024

An intimate and one-of-a-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and anthropologist. Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet media and politicians have always characterized smugglers-or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services-using tired tropes and stereotypes, as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years. The result of this unprecedented access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote, Chino, who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction

New Arrivals in the last 30 days:

(Arrivals are sorted by recency and then alphabetically)