More than 50 years since the founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, it would be reasonable to assume that modern U.S. factories are safe places to work. Surely, workplace-caused mesothelioma, silicosis and cancers are things of the past, suffered only in the bad old days before safety regulations forced employers to take care of their employees’ health. But Jim Morris, veteran journalist and author of The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers, knows better.

Morris focuses on Goodyear’s Niagara Falls plant, which manufactured anti-cracking agents for tires using ortho-toluidine, a powerful carcinogen that’s been known to be linked to bladder cancer since 1895. The Cancer Factory traces how this chemical destroyed the health, happiness and lives of the men who worked with it—and were sometimes even submerged in it—on a daily basis, without any safety equipment or knowledge of the dangers they were facing, even into the 21st century. 

Morris interviewed many families for the book, but none illustrates the matter more clearly than the family of Ray Kline, a Goodyear employee who worked for decades with some of the most carcinogenic chemicals at the plant with no protection. His clothes were drenched with the chemicals, and his wife, Dottie, who laundered them, eventually gave birth to two children with fatal birth defects. Their surviving daughter, Diane, grew up and married Harry Weist, another Goodyear factory worker. Ray and Harry both developed aggressive bladder cancer, enduring years of chemo, surgeries and epic misery.

Morris makes the case that the Goodyear bladder cancer cluster is emblematic of a much larger problem. He argues that corporate greed, broken regulatory agencies and hamstrung unions ensure that exposure to dioxins, asbestos, silica and hundreds of other hazards are not distant memories of our industrial past, but the lived reality of millions of workers today. Heartbreaking and infuriating, Morris’ storytelling jars the reader out of complacency. With luck, The Cancer Factory can also be an instrument for change.

On vacation in Rome in her early 20s, Elizabeth Flock was drugged and raped by a tour guide. She couldn’t defend herself during the attack, and she never reported it to the police. Over the years, she often wondered whether she would be better off if she had killed him the following morning. In The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice (Harper, $32, 9780063048805), Flock, now an Emmy-winning journalist who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times and The Atlantic, examines three women who did what she couldn’t do. It turns out the answer to her question is “maybe, but probably not.”

The figure of the avenging female is powerful and frightening. Flock notes that the Furies of ancient Greek mythology, who tormented Orestes, were hideous and pitiless—the stuff of nightmares. Flock makes a compelling argument that women who stand up for themselves are still seen in this same light. The three “furies” in the book certainly appear powerful and frightening, at least at first glance. The first, Brittany Smith, a young mother from Alabama, was imprisoned for murder after shooting the man who had brutally beaten and raped her. Flock travels to northern India to report on Angoori Dahariya, a Dalit woman who organized thousands of women to use bamboo canes to punish domestic abusers. In Syria, she reports on Cicek Mustafa Zibo, who joined an all-female militia to protect Kurdish women from the ISIS terrorists who were raping, torturing and murdering them.

Flock deeply admires these women for refusing to accept the terms of a society that prefers a dead, submissive woman to a living one who defends herself. But Flock also sees their frailty and their struggles. Brittany had lost custody of her four children due to her addiction to methamphetamines; at the time of her crime, she was off drugs and “confident all that was behind her.” Angoori can judge situations too quickly, sometimes with disastrous results. And Cicek is so traumatized by her physical and psychic war wounds that she becomes increasingly cut off from her family and her humanity. The women are drawn in shades of gray, and that is what makes The Furies so powerful. Brittany, Angoori and Cicek are not mythical figures, but ordinary, flawed humans who fight for their lives, their dignity and justice—despite the cost.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invented a new legal principle called qualified immunity that limited the public’s right to sue certain government employees. Seemingly designed to protect government officials from frivolous lawsuits, in practice, it mostly shields the police from being sued for misconduct, even if they’ve violated someone’s constitutional rights. In effect, it makes it perfectly legal for the police to infringe on citizens’ rights.

How did we get to the point where the people who are sworn to protect the law do not have to follow it? In her book, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz deftly explains the complicated web of laws and policies that exist in the United States for the sole purpose of protecting the police. In the process, she shines a light on every aspect of the justice system, from the federal jury system, which is disproportionately white and middle class, to Supreme Court decisions that make little sense in the context of everyday life.

After studying police accountability for decades, Schwartz’s expertise in criminal justice law shines in Shielded. The book is part research and part history, and it’s filled with important case law, most of which the average person won’t have heard of. These important courtroom precedents determine how the police are allowed to engage with the public, such as whether or not police need a warrant to search you when you’re minding your business walking down the street. (They don’t.) But this is no legalese-filled academic treatise. It’s incredibly engaging because Schwartz smoothly weaves the human story into each case she explains. After all, there is a real person behind every story of police misconduct. Someone was brutalized or their rights were ignored, and this book explains exactly how the police were allowed to get away with it.

Although these laws have been in place for decades, Schwartz doesn’t believe that they are unstoppable or that police misconduct will continue to go unpunished indefinitely. In addition to dissecting the problem, she also offers ideas for solutions, such as educating the public on the failures of criminal justice law and requiring the police to pay a portion of civil settlements. Shielded is a meaningful, well-researched and readable work that will open many discussions about this important social issue.