A trip Beyond the Down Low offers an honest look at stereotypes about sex and sexuality in Black America.

Best of OFF THE SHELF 2005

Four generations of Chinese women battle and bend to the cultural restrictions that ensure all women know their place in Irene Kai’s first book, The Golden Mountain.

Challenging current attempts at obfuscation and oversimplification, Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil tackles an issue that has fueled society, politics, and environmental destruction for over 100 years.

Does democracy matter? Philosopher Cornel West returns to the beginning of the great American experiment to find the answer.

An excerpt on the inequalities and injustices of the American penal system from Poli-Tainment, a resource guide for activists.

Salman Rushdie may be a movie star with rock star friends, but he still offers readers of his 2002 essay collection Step Across This Line valuable insight into the 2004 U.S. presidential election, democracy, and the war on terrorism.

A century after W.E.B. Du Bois penned The Souls of Black Folks, Rebecca Carroll illuminates just how much the renowned civil rights leader continues to influence modern notions of citizenship and blackness.

Even in an era of 24-hour news coverage, not all atrocities make the cut, including recent horrors in Sudan. Philosopher/essayist Bernard-Henri Levy spent a year of his life trying to find out what happened to the wars that time forgot, but was there anything left to find?