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What’s new and noteworthy, and some book advice from a friend.

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“With even President Clinton proclaiming that Americans must ‘clean house’ with regard to racism, the arrival of a book like this could hardly be more timely. It’s written at the human level, and looks practically at what people can do about racism without having to take on the world. It goes beyond the black/white thing; it’s about bridging the great divide from all sides.”

So says Robert Allen, senior editor of the Black Scholar, about Paul Kivel’s Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Philadelphia: New Society, 1995). Kivel, co-founder of the Oakland Men’s Project, draws upon many years of experience as a community organizer to sculpt a book that never becomes a manual for political correctness. You might also want to check out Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America–An Anthology (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), co-edited by Allen and Herb Boyd.

If ever there was a role model for budding young activists, it’s Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. In Mother Jones: One Woman’s Fight for Labor (New York: Clarion Books, 1995), Betsy Harvey Kraft gives a brief 100-page biography of one of the world’s most fearless labor leaders and women’s rights advocates at the turn of the century. Mother Jones’ humanistic hellraising is recommended bedtime reading for the kids, even if it means they’ll learn how to make the case for a bigger allowance.

And on the opposite side of the management-labor divide: On Our Own Terms: Portraits of Women Business Leaders by Liane Enkelis and Karen Olsen (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1995). They cover a diverse cross section of some of the most powerful women in business. On Our Own Terms’ “can-do” attitude aims to inspire the women business leaders of tomorrow, and is presented in an extremely accessible manner (big print, glossy cover, lots of pictures).

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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