The Grace Collection

Remember when airbags first came out and were touted as the safest invention for you car since seat belts but soon there were multiple stories of how lethal they were to women? Like many of us, author Caroline Criado Perez wondered how a supposed safety feature, meant to save lives, could be so detrimental to half the population. She discovered an answer that will surprise most of us. It turns out, during the entire design process for airbags, not only were women not included on the design teams but they weren't even considered during the testing process. And airbags aren't the only product to suffer from this lack of inclusion. The list of examples became so ludicrous, at one point while reading this book I had to ask my wife why women continue to put up  with men at all. Invisible Women is a fascinating read simply for all the details of the design process for everyday items it uncovers. Invisible is also, however, an indicator of the much larger issue that silently wraps i...

Douglas Blackmon, a bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal (one of the most conservative papers in America), was doing a story involving the industrial revolution in the South following the Civil War. While visiting a historic iron ore mine in Alabama, Blackmon stumbled across a section of the site that contained numerous graves. Curious, he asked his guide what they were looking at. The answer shocked him and began a long journey into the ugliness of the so-called judicial system that exploded across the former Confederacy following the emancipation of their cheap labor. Combing through spotty records that (amazingly) still exist in rural courthouses and linking those leads with personal correspondence and diaries from the same time period, Blackmon was able to reconstruct a shameful history of corrupt law enforcement officers, corrupt politicians and corrupt government officials all conspiring to oppress black people, coercing innocents into forced labor and, as those initial grave...