Elementary | Middle School / YA | Adult
Teaching for Change carefully selects the best multicultural and social justice books for children, young adults, and educators. Learn about our criteria for selecting titles. Feedback on these lists and suggestions for additional titles are welcome.
Most of the books on these lists are linked for more information or purchase to Bookshop (an indie bookstore platform) and / or Powells.com (an independent, unionized bookstore). A small percentage from book sales through these links goes to Teaching for Change.
Titles with reviews on this site are noted with an asterisk (*).
Also see these related booklists:
My Grandma's Photos
By Özge Bahar Sunar, Senta Urgan (Illustrator), and Amy Marie Spangler (Translator)
Tiny Stitches: The Life of Medical Pioneer Vivien Thomas
By Gwendolyn Hooks, Colin Bootman (Illustrator)
Chew on This: Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food
By Charles Wilson and Eric Schlosser
Mountains Beyond Mountains (Adapted for Young People): The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World
By Tracy Kidder, Michael French
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets Psychiatric Drugs & the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
By Robert Whitaker
Source documents: Mad in America - Anatomy Source Documents
Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942
By John McKiernan-González
Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore
By Nicole Fabricant
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, & the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
By Robert Whitaker
Documents and more information at: Mad in America.com
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
By Deirdre Cooper Owens
To learn more, listen to this podcast with the author on Learning for Justice
Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization in the United States
Edited by Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhatacharjee (Afterword by Angela Davis)
Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness
By Bruce M. Z. Cohen
Critical review: Psychiatric Hegemony