Books Are Playing a Role in Elevating and Transforming Chicago Communities
- billmoyers.com
This post originally appeared at AlterNet.

Snuggled under scaffolding in Chicago’s West Loop is an inconspicuous entranceway that leads to Open Books, a bookstore with over 54,000 used books on its shelves. Nearly all of the books for sale are donated, as are the 55,000 for sale online and the 20,000 more at its Pilsen location. This Thanksgiving will be the eighth anniversary of the first store opening, in Chicago’s River North.

Here in the West Loop, Open Books is the anchor store for the space above it, the Literacenter, a co-working space of 123 Chicago-area literacy programs and organizations that range from theater and poetry to childhood homelessness support and books for prisoners.

Tim O’Brien, Open Books executive director — and a former Open Books volunteer — says they process about 650,000 books a year. The book granting team hand-selects books to give to students, classrooms and homes, with a goal of capturing early readers with age- and interest-appropriate stories. “If the student sees themselves in a character, if they identify with the story, they’ll want to read more,” says O’Brien.

This, in turn, leads to community building. For example, cookbooks, especially for baking, are popular among young people because they foster engagement with a parent or grandparent; it gives the family something to read — and do — together.

The bookstore also supports multiple Open Books literacy programs, including creative writing workshops and a publishing academy.

The endorsement at least some people have been waiting for in the race for Alabama's U.S. Senate seat has arrived, with NBA great and former Auburn basketball player Charles Barkley telling NBC News, "if I lived here, I'd vote for Doug Jones."

Barkley -- asked to weigh in on politics while in Auburn for the unveiling of a statue of him outside Auburn's basketball arena on the day of the annual Iron Bowl clash with Alabama in football -- told NBC's Vaughan Hillyard that Republican nominee Roy Moore should have been "disqualified" from the race long before recent allegations surfaced that he sexually assaulted teenage girls and behaved inappropriately around others in the 1970s.

"Everybody's going crazy over these sexual allegations, Roy Moore to me, when he brought in Steve Bannon should have been disqualified," Barkley said. "I don't understand. How can you have a guy who's running with a white separatist running for a political office?

"We've got a lot of black people in this state who are amazing people but to run a campaign with a guy as your chief advocate who is a white nationalist or white separatist, that should have disqualified Roy Moore way before this women stuff came up."