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| Title | Author | Tags | Summary | Entry date | ||
| Assault in Norway: Sabotaging The Nazi Nuclear Program | Thomas Gallagher | history, resistance, sabotage, empire, military | "Assault in Norway is the classic account of a legendary raid on the Nazi war program. By 1942 Germany had a seemingly insurmountable lead over the Allies in developing an atomic bomb. Contributing to this situation was its access to a crucial ingredient: 'heavy water,' found in great abundance at a fortresslike factory in occupied Norway. Allied hopes of stalling the Nazi nuclear program soon focused on sabotaging the cliffside plant―a suicidal mission. But a team of brave Norwegian exiles, trained in Britain, infiltrated their homeland and, hiding in the wilds, awaited the opportunity to launch one of the war's most daring commando raids." | 2019-03-27 | ||
| Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in the Syrian Kurdistan | Michael Knapp | resistance, women, community | "Given the widespread violence and suffering in Syria, it's not unreasonable that outsiders look at the situation as unrelentingly awful. And while the reality of the devastation is undeniable, there is reason for hope in at least one small pocket of the nation: the cantons of Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan, where in the wake of war people are quietly building one of the most progressive societies in the world today. Revolution in Rojava tells the story of Rojava's groundbreaking experiment in what they call democratic confederalism, a communally organized democracy that is fiercely anti-capitalist and committed to female equality, while rejecting reactionary nationalist ideologies. Rooted in the ideas of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, the system is built on effective gender quotas, bottom-up democratic structures, far-sighted ecological policies, and a powerful militancy that has allowed the region to keep ISIS at bay. This first full-length study of democratic developments in Rojava tells an extraordinary and powerfully hopeful story of a little-known battle for true freedom in dark times." | 2018-04-11 | ||
| This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible | Charles E. Cobb Jr. | resistance, history, activism, white supremacy, racism | "Blending compelling experience with first-rate scholarship, Charles Cobb traces the way that armed self-defense and nonviolent direct action worked sometimes in tension but mostly in tandem in the African American freedom struggle. Crafted with powerful clarity and engaging prose, Cobb’s book deploys the intellectual insights of both everyday people and excellent historians to make the case that it wasn’t necessarily 'non-nonviolent' to pack a pistol or tote a shotgun in the civil rights–era South—but grassroots activists often found it necessary. This is easily the best, most accessible, and most comprehensive book on the subject." | 2017-09-21 | ||
| Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town | Melissa Checker | environmental racism, racism, toxins, sociology, community | "Over the past two decades, environmental racism has become the rallying cry for many communities as they discover the contaminations of toxic chemicals and industrial waste in their own backyards. Living next door to factories and industrial sites for years, the people in these communities often have record health problems and debilitating medical conditions. Melissa Checker tells the story of one such neighborhood, Hyde Park, in Augusta, Georgia, and the tenacious activism of its two hundred African American families. This community, at one time surrounded by nine polluting industries, is struggling to make their voices heard and their community safe again. Polluted Promises shows that even in the post-civil rights era, race and class are still key factors in determining the politics of pollution." |
2017-04-13 | ||
| One Cosmic Instant: Man's Fleeting Supremacy | John A Livingston | ecocide, human supremacy | "The value of his book is not in statistics, strategies, or hard science, but its placement of man as just one living species among many -- each an experiment in life's ingenuity and tenacity -- and its proposal of an ethic based on that radical humility, of which Livingston sets a graceful personal example. Following his loyalties, Livingston writes first of that delicate, tough, complex and thrifty entity, the biosphere, in which everything has its place and nothing is wasted. His account of wild communities and ecosystems, evolution and population controls, and of man's selfish violation of the natural law, is by now familiar ground; but his vividness, lucidity and sympathy make the book one of the best compact summaries of ecology around. Livingston sets the chance evolution of man in its ecological context, a salutary shock to human vanity, and probes man's feeling of separateness from and superiority to nature." | 2016-09-20 | ||
| The Myth of Human Supremacy | Derrick Jensen | ecocide, human supremacy, civilization | "In this impassioned polemic, radical environmental philosopher Derrick Jensen debunks the near-universal belief in a hierarchy of nature and the superiority of humans. Vast and underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life are explored in detail—from the cultures of pigs and prairie dogs, to the creative use of tools by elephants and fish, to the acumen of caterpillars and fungi. The paralysis of the scientific establishment on moral and ethical issues is confronted and a radical new framework for assessing the intelligence and sentience of nonhuman life is put forth. Jensen attacks mainstream environmental journalism, which too often limits discussions to how ecological changes affect humans or the economy—with little or no regard for nonhuman life. With his signature compassionate logic, he argues that when we separate ourselves from the rest of nature, we in fact orient ourselves against nature, taking an unjust and, in the long run, impossible position. Jensen expresses profound disdain for the human industrial complex and its ecological excesses, contending that it is based on the systematic exploitation of the earth. Page by page, Jensen, who has been called the philosopher-poet of the environmental movement, demonstrates his deep appreciation of the natural world in all its intimacy, and sounds an urgent call for its liberation from human domination." |
2016-07-31 | ||
| The Cross and the Lynching Tree | James H. Cone | history, Black studies, religion, lynching, racism, white supremacy, oppression | "The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols in the history of the African American community. In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk." | 2015-11-23 | ||
| They Are All Me | Dominique Christina | poems, Black studies, women | "They Are All Me, Dominique Christina's second full length collection of poetry and third book, collapses that separation between compassion and rage. Here is a book of a linguistic brilliance and of praise for the entourage of African-American heroes and martyrs who are part of all our souls’ memories." | 2015-11-23 | ||
| Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern | J. Sakai | essays, history, whiteness, race, racism, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism | "A uniquely important book in the canon of the North American revolutionary left and anticolonial movements, Settlers was first published in the 1980s. Written by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements. Always controversial within the establishment left, Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. As recounted in painful detail by J. Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence. This new edition includes a new essay and an interview with author J. Sakai by Ernesto Aguilar." | 2015-11-23 | ||
| This Is Woman's Work: Calling Forth Your Inner Council of Wise, Brave, Crazy, Rebellious, Loving, Luminous Selves | Dominique Christina | feminism, radical feminism, women | "'A woman's work is to define herself,' writes award-winning slam poet Dominique Christina. While this task is important for everybody, Dominique says, 'There is an urgency for women. When you have inherited a construct that names, describes, and practices an ideology that women are somehow less important, less necessary, then the work of defining yourself carries with it a kind of fury.' Every woman is composed of many selves-archetypal players of the psyche who contribute their voices to her greater 'I.' This Is Woman's Work introduces us to our council of inner women, delving into the secret wisdom and gifts of the Willing Woman, the Rebel, the Shapeshifter, the Warrior, and more. Combining writing exercises with fresh and dynamic insights, Dominique helps us make an intimate connection with each inner woman-known and unknown, loved and feared-so we may integrate their voices, realize their wisdom, and open ourselves to our full expression and power." |
2015-11-23 | ||
| The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm: A Colored Girl's Hymnal | Dominique Christina | poems, Black studies, women | "This book is Dominique Christina's first full length volume of poetry. Published by Penmanship Books in New York. It is as much confession as it is celebration of all the music and macabre that make us so deeply human...so impossibly free." | 2015-11-23 | ||
| The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America | Theodore W. Allen | history, race, whiteness, racism, white supremacy, slavery, Black studies | "In Volume II of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen explores the transformation that turned African bond-laborers into slaves and segregated them from their fellow proletarians of European origin. In response to labor unrest, where solidarities were not determined by skin color, the plantation bourgeoisie sought to construct a buffer of poor whites, whose new racial identity would protect them from the enslavement visited upon African Americans. This was the invention of the white race, an act of cruel ingenuity that haunts America to this day. Allen’s acclaimed study has become indispensable in debates on the origins of racial oppression in America. In this updated edition, scholar Jeffrey B. Perry provides a new introduction, a select bibliography and a study guide." | 2015-11-23 | ||
| The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control | Theodore W. Allen | history, race, whiteness, racism, white supremacy, Black studies | "When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the 'white race' as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history. Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the 'white' oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America." |
2015-11-23 | ||
| How the Irish Became White | Noel Ignatiev | history, race, whiteness, white supremacy, racism | "The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White." | 2015-10-20 | ||
| An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States | Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | history, indigenous people, colonialism, genocide, United States | "Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: 'The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.' Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative." |
2015-04-24 | ||
| Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences | Rebecca M. Jordan-Young | gender, psychology, science | "Female and male brains are different, thanks to hormones coursing through the brain before birth. That’s taught as fact in psychology textbooks, academic journals, and bestselling books. And these hardwired differences explain everything from sexual orientation to gender identity, to why there aren’t more women physicists or more stay-at-home dads. In this compelling book, Rebecca Jordan-Young takes on the evidence that sex differences are hardwired into the brain. Analyzing virtually all published research that supports the claims of “human brain organization theory,” Jordan-Young reveals how often these studies fail the standards of science. Even if careful researchers point out the limits of their own studies, other researchers and journalists can easily ignore them because brain organization theory just sounds so right. But if a series of methodological weaknesses, questionable assumptions, inconsistent definitions, and enormous gaps between ambiguous findings and grand conclusions have accumulated through the years, then science isn’t scientific at all. Elegantly written, this book argues passionately that the analysis of gender differences deserves far more rigorous, biologically sophisticated science. 'The evidence for hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain better resembles a hodge-podge pile than a solid structure…Once we have cleared the rubble, we can begin to build newer, more scientific stories about human development.'" |
2015-04-18 | ||
| The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class | David R. Roediger | history, racism, working class, whiteness | "Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Memoir of a Race Traitor | Mab Segrest | memoir, racism, resistance, whiteness | "Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family's history, Mab Segrest explores her experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape | Charlotte Pierce-Baker | male violence against women, testimony, women, Black studies | "In this 'intelligent', 'stunning', and 'honest' book, Charlotte Pierce-Baker weaves together the accounts of black women who have been raped and who have felt that they had to remain silent in order to protect themselves and their race. It opens with the author's harrowing and courageous account of her rape and includes the stories of the author's own family's response, plus the voices of black men who have supported rape survivors." |
2015-04-13 | ||
| The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth | John Bellamy Foster | ecocide, capitalism, marxism | "Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don’t alter course." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement | Susan Schechter | feminism, male violence against women, resistance | "Takes an in-depth look at battering and the social movement against it. It describes not only the horrifying experiences of victims, but the powerful movement that demands an end to violence against women and permanent changes in the conditions of women's lives." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation | Silvia Federici | history, feminism, capitalism, women | "Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto | Michal Grynberg | history, resistance, war | "This collective memoir--a mosaic of individual diaries, journals, and accounts--follows the fate of the Warsaw Jews from the first bombardments of the Polish capital to the razing of the Jewish district: the frantic exchange of apartments as the walls first go up; the daily battle against starvation and disease; the moral ambiguities confronting Jewish bureaucracies under Nazi rule; the ingenuity of smugglers; and the acts of resistance. Stunning in their immediacy, these urgent accounts challenge us to imagine the unimaginable." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| The Sociopath Next Door | Martha Stout | mental health, psychology, abuse | "[Dr.] Stout says that as many as 4% of the population are conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings for humans or animals. As Stout (The Myth of Sanity) explains, a sociopath is defined as someone who displays at least three of seven distinguishing characteristics, such as deceitfulness, impulsivity and a lack of remorse. Such people often have a superficial charm, which they exercise ruthlessly in order to get what they want. Stout argues that the development of sociopathy is due half to genetics and half to nongenetic influences that have not been clearly identified. The author offers three examples of such people, including Skip, the handsome, brilliant, superrich boy who enjoyed stabbing bullfrogs near his family's summer home, and Doreen, who lied about her credentials to get work at a psychiatric institute, manipulated her colleagues and, most cruelly, a patient. Dramatic as these tales are, they are composites, and while Stout is a good writer and her exploration of sociopaths can be arresting, this book occasionally appeals to readers' paranoia, as the book's title and its guidelines for dealing with sociopaths indicate. " | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 | Grace Elizabeth Hale | history, racism, whiteness | "Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity. In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation. And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern 'whiteness' was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism | Natasha Walter | feminism, patriarchy, gender | "I once believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was wrong.' Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. Drawing on a wealth of research and personal interviews, LIVING DOLLS is a straight-talking, passionate and important book that makes us look afresh at women and girls, at sexism and femininity - today." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq | Stephen Kinzer | history, repression, empire, war, state terrorism | "The recent ouster of Saddam Hussein may have turned 'regime change' into a contemporary buzzword, but it's been a tactic of American foreign policy for more than 110 years. Beginning with the ouster of Hawaii's monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written about at length before (in All the Shah's Men, etc.). Recent invasions of countries such as Grenada and Panama may be more familiar to readers than earlier interventions in Iran and Nicaragua, but Kinzer, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, brings a rich narrative immediacy to all of his stories. Although some of his assertions overreach themselves—as when he proposes that better conduct by the American government in the Spanish-American War might have prevented the rise of Castro a half-century later—he makes a persuasive case that U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and often leaves countries worse off than they were before. Kinzer's argument isn't new, but it's delivered in unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience larger than the usual crew of die-hard leftists." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror | Alfred McCoy | history, torture, repression, empire, state terrorism | "In this revelatory account of the CIA's fifty-year effort to develop new forms of torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy locates the deep roots of recent scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in a long-standing, covert program of interrogation. A Question of Torture investigates the CIA's practice of 'sensory deprivation' and 'self-inflicted pain,' in which techniques including isolation, hooding, hours of standing, and manipulation of time assault the victim's senses and destroy the basis of personal identity. McCoy traces the spread of these practices across the globe, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, and argues that after 9/11, psychological torture became the weapon of choice in the CIA's global prisons, reinforced by 'rendition' of detainees to 'torture-friendly' countries. Finally, McCoy shows that information extracted by coercion is worthless, making a strong case for the FBI's legal methods of interrogation." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Privilege, Power, and Difference | Allan G. Johnson | sociology, privilege, power, gender, racism | "Privilege, Power, and Difference is an outstanding discussion of how social systems work to perpetuate privilege, how individuals choose to interact with those systems, and how we can create positive change." | 2015-04-13 | ||
| Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 | Amy Louise Wood | history, racism, lynching, white supremacy, oppression | "Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life. Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life." |
2015-03-26 | ||
| Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching | Crystal N. Feimster | history, racism, male violence against women, feminism, lynching, oppression | "Historian Crystal N. Feimster provides an opportunity to better understand the lack of sympathy between black and white suffragists and how lynching spurred both to the political activism that eventually won women the vote...This account leaves us with a sense of what made the fights for racial equality and women's suffrage so complicated and contentious. We're left, too, with an appreciation of the gumption both Wells and Felton showed entering a political fray resistant to their participation and unable to conceive of changes that seem so obviously necessary in hindsight." | 2015-03-26 | ||
| In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings | Catharine A. MacKinnon | testimony, pornography, feminism, radical feminism | "This book contains the oral testimony of victims of pornography, spoken on the record for the first time in history. Speaking at hearings on a groundbreaking antipornography civil rights law, women offer eloquent witness to the devastation pornography has caused in their lives. Supported by social science experts and authorities on rape, battery, and prostitution, discounted and opposed by free speech advocates and absolutists, their riveting testimony articulates the centrality of pornography to sexual abuse and inequity today. At issue in these hearings is a law conceived and drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon that defines harm done through pornography as a legal injury of sex discrimination warranting civil redress. From the first set of hearings in Minneapolis in 1983 through those before the Massachusetts state legislature in 1992, the witnesses heard here expose the commonplace reality of denigration and sexual subordination due to pornography and refute the widespread notion that pornography is harmless expression that must be protected by the state. Introduced with powerful essays by MacKinnon and Dworkin, these hearings--unabridged and with each word scrupulously verified--constitute a unique record of a conflict over the meaning of democracy itself--a major civil rights struggle for our time and a fundamental crisis in United States constitutional law: Can we sacrifice the lives of women and children to a pornographer's right to free 'speech'? Can we allow the First Amendment to shield sexual exploitation and predatory sexual violence? These pages contain all the arguments for protecting pornography--and dramatically document its human cost. " |
2015-03-23 | ||
| Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues | Catharine A. MacKinnon | feminism, radical feminism, women | "More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights defined what a human being is and is entitled to, Catharine MacKinnon asks: Are women human yet? If women were regarded as human, would they be sold into sexual slavery worldwide; veiled, silenced, and imprisoned in homes; bred, and worked as menials for little or no pay; stoned for sex outside marriage or burned within it; mutilated genitally, impoverished economically, and mired in illiteracy--all as a matter of course and without effective recourse? The cutting edge is where law and culture hurts, which is where MacKinnon operates in these essays on the transnational status and treatment of women. Taking her gendered critique of the state to the international plane, ranging widely intellectually and concretely, she exposes the consequences and significance of the systematic maltreatment of women and its systemic condonation. And she points toward fresh ways--social, legal, and political--of targeting its toxic orthodoxies. MacKinnon takes us inside the workings of nation-states, where the oppression of women defines community life and distributes power in society and government. She takes us to Bosnia-Herzogovina for a harrowing look at how the wholesale rape and murder of women and girls there was an act of genocide, not a side effect of war. She takes us into the heart of the international law of conflict to ask--and reveal--why the international community can rally against terrorists' violence, but not against violence against women. A critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights, this bracing book makes us look as never before at an ongoing war too long undeclared. " |
2015-03-23 | ||
| Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire | Philippa Levine | prostitution, racism, colonialism, women, patriarchy, male violence against women | "In addition to shouldering the blame for the increasing incidence of venereal disease among sailors and soldiers, prostitutes throughout the British Empire also bore the burden of the contagious diseases ordinances that the British government passed. By studying how British authorities enforced these laws in four colonial sites between the 1860s and the end of the First World War, Philippa Levine reveals how myths and prejudices about the sexual practices of colonized peoples not only had a direct and often punishing effect on how the laws operated, but how they also further justified the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized." | 2015-03-23 | ||
| Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self | Kajsa Ekis Ekman | feminism, radical feminism, prostitution, resistance, male violence against women | "In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation criminalising the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution -- and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain -- Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the sex work scenario. Trade unions aren't trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman's point of view. The men who buy sex are left out. Drawing on Marxist and feminist analyses, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self must be split from the body to make it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body becomes sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is the ideal. Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking? This brilliant exposé is written with a razor-sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way." | 2015-03-23 | ||
| From Housewife to Heretic | Sonia Johnson | memoir, patriarchy, women, feminism | "Sonia Johnson's roots in the Mormon church went back for five generations. She'd been married for twenty years, was a dedicated homemaker and the mother of four children. Then, suddenly, her life began to come apart. Awakening feminism brought her into conflict with the church fathers who, finding her guilty of promoting false doctrine, excommunicated her. Her husband wanted a divorce, because he was, he said, 'tired of working on our marriage.' Sonia Johnson was shattered. But she prevailed. Sonia Johnson is now a heroine of the Equal Rights movement. And she begins her dramatic true story with the realization 'of being happier than I have ever been in my life.' From Housewife to Heretic is much more than her account of that heartrending year. It is an insider's view of the present-day Mormon church and its male-dominated hierarchy. It is a fascinating account of a woman's gradual, even unwilling, progression from self-denial to activism. It is, above all, a story of loss and rebirth, despair and fulfillment--a book for millions of women trying to reconcile their belief in feminism with their belief in the family and religion." |
2015-03-23 | ||
| Woman's Inhumanity to Woman | Phyllis Chesler | feminism, women, patriarchy | "'Man’s inhumanity to man'--the phrase is all too familiar. But until Phyllis Chesler's now-classic book, a profound silence prevailed about woman’s inhumanity to woman. Women's aggression may not take the same form as men's, but girls and women are indeed aggressive, often indirectly and mainly toward one another. They judge harshly, hold grudges, gossip, exclude, and disconnect from other women. Like men, women are exposed to the messages of misogyny and sexism that permeate cultures worldwide. Like men, women unconsciously buy into negative images that can trigger abuse and mistreatment of other women. But like other social victims, many do not realize stereotyping affects members within the victimized group as well as those outside the group. They do not realize their behavior reflects society's biases. How women view and treat other women matters. Are women oppressed? Yes. Do oppressed people internalize their oppressors' attitudes? Without a doubt. Prejudice must first be acknowledged before it can be resisted or overcome. More than men, women depend upon one another for emotional intimacy and bonding, and exclusionary and sexist behavior enforces female conformity and discourages independence and psychological growth." |
2015-03-23 | ||
| Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future | Heidi Goettner-Abendroth | anthropology, women | "Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future celebrates women's largely ignored and/or invisible contribution to culture by exploring matriarchal societies that have existed in the past and that continue to exist today in certain parts of the world. Matriarchal societies, primarily shaped by women, have a non violent social order in which all living creatures are respected without the exploitation of humans, animals or nature. They are well-balanced and peaceful societies in which domination is unknown and all beings are treated equally. This book presents these largely misunderstood societies, both past and present, to the wider public, as alternative social and cultural models that promote trust, mutuality, and abundance for all." | 2015-03-23 | ||
| At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America | Philip Dray | history, racism, Black studies, oppression, lynching | "Between 1882 and 1944 at least 3,417 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, an average of slightly more than one a week. It was not until 1952, as Dray notes, that a full year went by without a reported racial lynching. Covering the South's resistance to racial equality from Reconstruction and the 1875 Civil Rights Act (which gave rise to the widespread acceptance of public murders) through the mid-20th century, this prodigiously researched, tightly written and compelling history of the lynching of African-Americans examines the social background behind the horrific acts. Yet Dray (We Are Not Afraid) also covers the myriad attempts of popular and judicial resistance to lynching, in particular the campaigns led by Ida B. Wells and by the NAACP. He has pulled together a wealth of cultural material, including D.W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, Reginald Marsh's famous 1934 antilynching cartoon in the New Yorker, among much else, to supplement his impressive survey of the breadth of lynching in Southern society. While there is much shocking material here the 1918 lynching and disembowelment of eight-month-pregnant Mary Turner; California governor James Rolph Jr.'s 1933 statement that lynching was "a fine lesson for the whole nation" Dray never lets it dictate the complex social and political story he is telling. He faces the underlying sexual impulse of most lynchings head-on and shows how, in the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, the fear of blacks was transferred to a Jewish victim. Whether he is explicating why the feminist-run Women's Christian Temperance Union refused to speak out against lynching, or why FDR refused to endorse antilynching legislation in the 1930s, Dray balances moral indignation with a sound understanding of history and politics. The result is vital, hard-hitting cultural history." | 2015-03-02 | ||
| Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (Our Sustainable Future) | Ozzie Zehner | technology, climate change | "We don’t have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what’s wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy—more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels—alternative technologies come with their own side effects and limitations. How, for instance, do solar cells cause harm? Why can’t engineers solve wind power’s biggest obstacle? Why won’t contraception solve the problem of overpopulation lying at the heart of our concerns about energy, and what will?" | 2014-12-19 | ||
| Techno-Fix: Why Technology Won't Save Us Or the Environment | Michael Huesemann | technology, climate change | "Techno-Fix questions a primary paradigm of our age: that advanced technology will extricate us from an ever increasing load of social, environmental, and economic ills. Techno-Fix shows why negative unintended consequences of science and technology are inherently unavoidable and unpredictable, why counter-technologies, techno-fixes, and efficiency improvements do not offer lasting solutions, and why modern technology, in the presence of continued economic growth, does not promote sustainability but instead hastens collapse." | 2014-12-19 | ||
| Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats | Kristen Iversen | memoir, health, radiation, history | "Full Body Burden is Kristen Iversen's story of growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family secrets and government secrets. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what they made at Rocky Flats—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities. As this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a shocking account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice in court. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life." |
2014-04-16 | ||
| MaddAddam: A Novel | Margaret Atwood | novel, speculative fiction, dystopia, biotechnology | "The final entry in Atwood's brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire. The novel begins where Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood end, just after most of the human species has been eradicated by a man-made plague. The early books explore a world of terrifying corporate tyranny, horrifying brutality, and the relentless rape of women and the planet. In Oryx and Crake, the pandemic leaves wounded protagonist Jimmy to watch over the Crakers, a humanoid species bioengineered to replace humankind by the man responsible for unleashing the plague. In The Year of the Flood, MaddAddamites wield science to terrorize corporate villains while God's Gardeners use prayer and devotion to the Earth to prepare for the approaching cataclysm. Toby, a God's Gardener and key character in the second book, narrates the third installment, in which a few survivors, including MaddAddamites, God's Gardeners, Jimmy, and the Crakers, navigate a postapocalyptic world. Toby is reunited with Zeb, her MaddAddamite romantic interest in Year of the Flood, and the two become leaders and defenders of their new community. The survivors are a traumatized, cynical group with harshly tested self-preservation skills, but they have the capacity for love and self-sacrifice, which in a simpler story would signal hope for the future of humankind. However, Atwood dramatizes the importance of all life so convincingly that readers will hesitate to assume that the perpetuation of a species as destructive as man is the novel's central concern. With childlike stubbornness, even the peaceful Crakers demand mythology and insist on deifying people whose motives they can't understand. Other species genetically engineered for exploitation by now-extinct corporations roam the new frontier; some are hostile to man, including the pigoons—a powerful and uniquely perceptive source of bacon and menace. Threatening humans, Crakers, and pigoons are Painballers—former prisoners dehumanized in grotesque life-or-death battles. The Crakers cannot fight, the bloodthirsty Painballers will not yield, and the humans are outnumbered by the pigoons. Happily, Atwood has more surprises in store. Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind's failings but with a sense of awe at humanity's barely explored potential to evolve." | 2014-04-11 | ||
| Proving Manhood: Reflections on Men and Sexism | Timothy Beneke | feminism, radical feminism, masculinity, patriarchy, male ally | "Is male chauvinism a natural byproduct of American masculinity, or does it reflect a deeper pain and fear at the heart of gender relations? With sensitivity and honesty, Timothy Beneke, author of Men on Rape, frames the issue of sexism as a problem of masculinity, one deeply rooted in cultural ideals of manhood and forever opposed to the feminine. Men are required to 'prove' their masculinity daily from childhood on. They are forced to endure situations of stress and distress that demonstrate their strength and unflappable endurance. In rituals such as sports, sex, and work, men constantly invent and renew their masculine identities as they learn to repress and reject all 'feminized' behavior. Pornography, homophobia, and the morning sports section become crucial 'proving grounds' where masculinity is tested and asserted. Beneke argues that men demonstrate the attitudes that underlie sexism in the psychically related practices of reading the sports page and pornographic magazines. In both, men can test their manhood vicariously. Following the lives and careers of athletes religiously in the sports pages, men celebrate and identify with the physical endurance and strength that is at the core of the masculine ideal from the safety of their living rooms. Gazing at languishing nudes in Playboy, men similarly identify with an ideal of masculine prowess and superiority safe from any threatening manifestations of female sexuality. Beneke negotiates the minefield of sexual politics with intelligence and skill. He draws extensively on his experience as an anti-rape activist to understand the roots of male aggression. With personal anecdotes of hero-worship and guilt over his own struggle with latent sexism, Beneke incorporates a thought-provoking self critique into this unique study of modern masculinity." |
2014-03-03 | ||
| Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960's | Milton Viorst | history, resistance | "'This is a book about america in the 1960s,' Milton Viorst informs us in his opening sentence, and a good book it is. Accustomed as we are to chopping our history into neat segments -- defined by wars, presidential administrations, or decades -- we are especially fascinated by the sixties, which generated such an acute consciousness of historical significance. 'Whoever lived through those years will inevitably remember them as tumultuous, exalting, and foreboding,' the author suggests, adding that they were 'very bewildering as well.'" | 2014-03-02 | ||
| Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law | Catharine A. MacKinnon | essays, feminism, radical feminism, law | "Catharine A. MacKinnon, noted feminist and legal scholar, explores and develops her original theories and practical proposals on sexual politics and law. These discourses, originally delivered as speeches, have been brilliantly woven into a book that retains all the spontaneity and accessibility of a live presentation. MacKinnon offers a unique retrospective on the law of sexual harassment, which she designed and has worked for a decade to establish, and a prospectus on the law of pornography, which she proposes to change in the next ten years. Authentic in voice, sweeping in scope, startling in clarity, urgent, never compromised and often visionary, these discourses advance a new theory of sex inequality and imagine new possibilities for social change. Through these engaged works on issues such as rape, abortion, athletics, sexual harassment, and pornography, MacKinnon seeks feminism on its own terms, unconstrained by the limits of prior traditions. She argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference--as virtually all existing theory and law have done--covers up the reality of gender, which is a system of social hierarchy, an imposed inequality of power. She reveals a political system of male dominance and female subordination that sexualizes power for men and powerlessness for women. She analyzes the failure of organized feminism, particularly legal feminism, to alter this condition, exposing the way male supremacy gives women a survival stake in the system that destroys them." |
2014-02-12 | ||
| The Creation of Patriarchy | Gerda Lerner | history, feminism, women, gender, patriarchy | "A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not 'natural' or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process. Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay--more than 3,500 years--in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations--those of the ancient Near East--to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations." |
2014-02-12 | ||
| A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France | Caroline Moorehead | history, resistance, women | "In January 1943, 230 women of the French Resistance were sent to the death camps by the Nazis who had invaded and occupied their country. This is their story, told in full for the first time—a searing and unforgettable chronicle of terror, courage, defiance, survival, and the power of friendship. Caroline Moorehead, a distinguished biographer, human rights journalist, and the author of Dancing to the Precipice and Human Cargo, brings to life an extraordinary story that readers of Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La, Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, and Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken will find an essential addition to our retelling of the history of World War II—a riveting, rediscovered story of courageous women who sacrificed everything to combat the march of evil across the world." | 2014-01-06 | ||
| Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism | Greg Grandin | history, empire | "The British and Roman empires are often invoked as precedents to the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy. But America’s imperial identity was actually shaped much closer to home. In a brilliant excavation of long-obscured history, Empire’s Workshop shows how Latin America has functioned as a proving ground for American strategies and tactics overseas. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States’ imperial operations from Jefferson’s aspirations for an “empire of liberty” in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Reagan’s support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush’s current policies back to Latin America, where many of the administration’s leading lights first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free market economics and enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures. With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin asks: If Washington failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America—its own backyard “workshop”—what are the chances it will do so for the world?" |
2013-12-29 | ||
| Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism | Sheila Jeffreys | feminism, radical feminism, gender | "Gender Hurts examines the wider social and political context and implications of the phenomenon of transgenderism. Jeffreys and Gottschalk propose that gender in western culture is socially constructed as the basis of male domination and that the concept of gender has the potential to hurt many. They argue that in transgenderism the hurt can take several forms; psychologically, physically and socially. This book explore how the phenomenon is affecting people’s lives from exploring the implications for the children and adults who are diagnosed as having gender identity disorder, to the survivors’ movement who claim to have been misdiagnosed, and the impact on the partners of transgenders." | 2013-07-01 |
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