NYC Books Through Bars and Freebird Books Monthly Bundle for May 2021.
May’s picks focus on political iconoclasts and great thinkers like Assata Shakur and James Baldwin

Purchase three works for $30 (35% off retail): Assata: An Autobiography, Giovanni’s Room, and a selection from the Penguin Great Ideas Series at www.freebirdbooks.com/shop.html

Many thanks to all of you who have participated in our ongoing drive to benefit NYC Books Through Bars! We truly appreciate your generosity at this time (over 8,000 books purchased on their behalf since June 2020!), when those incarcerated face ever greater obstacles getting access to written material. 

May 2021’s pick: Assata: An Autobiography, Giovanni’s Room, and a selection from the Penguin Great Ideas Series–three books for $30 

Following April’s drive (almost 700 books collected!) is a bundle focusing on great thinkers and political iconoclasts.  Assata Shakur and James Baldwin were firebrands in the 1960s and 70s who challenged mainstream culture and racial assumptions through their words and activism. 

Shakur’s 1987 autobiography has become an important document of Black resistance movements that reveals the incredible lengths the U.S. government went to stifle revolutionary thought at the height of the Civil Rights era.

Though James Baldwin’s own nonfiction (essays, criticism, polemics) is substantial, we decided to focus on his fiction this month, and the novel Giovanni’s Room. Set in 1950’s Paris and amongst a community of American expatriates, Baldwin tackles social isolation, gender and sexual identity crisis, as well as conflicts of masculinity within this story of a young bisexual man navigating the public sphere in a society that rejects a core aspect of his sexuality.

Rounding out the bundle are classic works from the Penguin Great Ideas Series, which your purchase will allow us to provide incarcerated readers with a variety of, like works on evolution, political theory, the ethics of the Samurai, and women’s rights. 

To learn more about the important work NYC Books Through Bars does, go here.