ACLU of Southern California Summer Reading Guide 2023

Policing the Womb

Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood

By: Michele Goodwin
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 13 hours 14 minutes

Policing the Womb brings to life the chilling ways in which women have become the targets of secretive state surveillance of their pregnancies. Michele Goodwin expands the reproductive health and rights debate beyond abortion to include how legislators increasingly turn to criminalizing women for miscarriages, stillbirths, and threatening the... Read more

The Turnaway Study

The Cost of Denying Women Access to Abortion

By: Diana Greene Foster
Narrated by: Samantha Desz & Full Cast
Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

“If you read only one book about democracy, The Turnaway Study should be it. Why? Because without the power to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” —Gloria Steinem

The “remarkable” (The New Yorker) landmark study of the consequences on women’s lives—emotional, physical, financial, professional, personal, and... Read more

Hitler in Los Angeles

How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots against Hollywood and America

By: Steven J. Ross
Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
Length: 13 hours 59 minutes

This is the chilling, little-known story of the rise of Nazism in Los Angeles and the Jewish leaders and spies they recruited who stopped it.No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city’s Jews and to sabotage the nation’s... Read more

Shielded

How the Police Became Untouchable

By: Joanna Schwartz
Narrated by: Joanna Schwartz
Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

An urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country's leading scholars on policing

In recent years, the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others have brought much-needed attention to the pervasiveness of police misconduct. Yet it... Read more

Golden Gulag

Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

By: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Narrated by: Machelle Williams
Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for... Read more

Your House Will Pay

A Novel

By: Steph Cha
Narrated by: Greta Jung & Glenn Davis
Length: 9 hours 50 minutes

“Riveting story of two families struggles as racial violence has forever bound them together. Read more

Bad Mexicans

Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands

By: Kelly Lytle Hernández
Narrated by: Joana Garcia
Length: 13 hours 34 minutes

Bad Mexicans tells the dramatic story of the magonistas, the migrant rebels who sparked the 1910 Mexican Revolution from the United States. Led by a brilliant but ill-tempered radical named Ricardo Flores Magón, the magonistas were a motley band of journalists, miners, migrant workers, and more, who organized thousands of Mexican workers—and... Read more

We Are the Land

A History of Native California

By: Damon B. Akins & William J. Bauer, Jr.
Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
Length: 15 hours 49 minutes

Before there was such a thing as "California," there were the People and the Land. Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, and settler colonial society drew maps, displaced Indigenous People, and reshaped the land, but they did not make California. Rather, the lives and legacies of the people native to the land shaped the creation of California. We Are... Read more

Brown and Gay in LA

The Lives of Immigrant Sons

By: Anthony Christian Ocampo
Narrated by: Grayson Villanueva
Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles
Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship... Read more

Disability Visibility (Adapted for Young Adults)

First-Person Stories for Today

By: Alice Wong
Narrated by: Sarah Ann Masse, Anthony Michael Lopez & Alice Wong
Length: 2 hours 44 minutes

Disabled young people will be proud to see themselves reflected in this hopeful, compelling, and insightful essay collection, adapted for young adults from the critically acclaimed adult book, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century that "sheds light on the experience of life as an individual with disabilities,... Read more

Minor Feelings

An Asian American Reckoning

By: Cathy Park Hong
Narrated by: Cathy Park Hong
Length: 6 hours 52 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In... Read more

There There

A novel

By: Tommy Orange
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo & Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes

“A stunning debut novel by an original voice. Twelve characters of Native American descent, interrelated by birth or chance, struggle with the competing forces of cultural history and modern urban existence. Their stories build separately before colliding powerfully in the book’s final pages at The Big Oakland Powwow. I was riveted. Read more

When the Emperor Was Divine

By: Julie Otsuka
Narrated by: Elaina Erika Davis
Length: 3 hours 24 minutes

Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination—both physical and emotional—of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point... Read more

Only This Beautiful Moment

By: Abdi Nazemian
Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Fajer Al-Kaisi & Iman Nazemzadeh
Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

Stonewall Book Award Winner * A Best Book of the Year from the Guardian, ALA Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage From the award–winning author of Like a Love Story comes a sweeping story of three generations of boys in the same Iranian family. Perfect for fans of Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay. 2019. Moud is... Read more

Afterparties

Stories

By: Anthony Veasna So
Narrated by: Jason Sean
Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

“I enjoyed this book of short stories about the lives of Khmer refugees and their American born children in California’s central valley. Each story makes the reader feel like they are embedded in a particularly family--the tension between the American born children and their parents who escaped the genocide sets the backdrop to many, but the... Read more

The Argonauts

By: Maggie Nelson
Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and familyMaggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the... Read more