Elevate Difference

Reviews of PM Press

Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon

Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away With the Spoon review, short version: If you have children, know children, or were ever a child yourself, you need this new coloring book by Jacinta Bunnell and Nathaniel Kusinitz.

Revolutionary Women: A Book of Stencils

I'm all for learning more—and for disseminating information to a wide audience—about women who have played significant roles in history. All too often, women who have contributed to movements for change have been given all too little (or no) attention or credit. I agree that we need to have a more complete picture of the female revolutionaries who risked and sometimes gave their lives for a cause.

Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World

Wherever one falls on the meat-eater to vegan continuum, you need to make the Torres duo your truth-speaking, profanity-spewing, tough-loving pals. They will move you closer to ethical veganism. For the already-vegan, Bob and Jenna offer the rationale and the moral support to stay that way. For four years, these wacky Ph.D.s have provided social commentary and intellectual critique to and for vegans through their podcast, blog, online forum and publications.

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

We are all familiar with the smiling happy portrayals of pilgrims sitting down to dinner with Native Americans, or perhaps the slightly more critical viewpoint from many of our high school history books of the Indigenous people being simply helpless victims to European colonization.

My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities

My Baby Rides the Short Bus is an anthology of articles written by parents about their firsthand experiences of raising children with disabilities. In addition to their common identity as parents of disabled children, the contributors also share another trait: all of them find themselves outside of the mainstream by virtue of identity or political perspective.

Self-Defense for Radicals: A to Z Guide for Subversive Struggle

While it’s true that most conflict can and should be resolved with nonviolence, even peace-loving radicals like Mickey Z., the author of this alphabetical guide to self-defense, acknowledge that an absolute aversion to violence is nearly impossible in our war-loving (yet God-fearing) society that seems to tolerate blood-n-guts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In a country where a woman is raped every forty-six seconds, peaceful resolution can quickly become a warm fuzzy afterthought. The reality is that standing up for something usually requires standing up against something.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Recorded from a lecture in May 2008, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is an engaging, well-crafted talk by economist-writer-activist Naomi Klein about the problems of increasingly pervasive neoliberal privatization of land and resources on a global scale.

Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating

I’ve long enjoyed Lisa Jervis’ critical analysis, a woman best known in feminist circles as the co-founder of Bitch magazine. Growing into my own love of all things kitchen this past year, I fully expected to be won over by Cook Food; sadly, I was not. It seems like a complicated time to write this book.

Geek Mafia

Rick Dakan’s novel, Geek Mafia, tells the exciting tale of Paul Reynolds, a recently unemployed comic book artist/videogame designer who befriends a wild crew of techie con men and women living in Silicon Valley.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics. Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness.

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

Of the many staggering statistics in Victoria Law’s eight-year study, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women, the following fact will make your jaw drop: the number of incarcerated women in United States prisons has almost doubled from 68,468 to 104,848 between 1995 and 2004. Like their male counterparts, this population of women is overwhelmingly comprised of African Americans and Latinas, which can be largely attributed to racial prof

I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex

Sexual slavery is a serious problem in the world. While the numbers vary between agencies, the most commonly reported statistics are from the U.S. State Department’s 2005 report on trafficked persons, which estimates that 600,000 to 800,000 people are illegally trafficked across international borders, with 14,500 to 17,500 trafficked to the U.S. These numbers include all forms of forced labor, but sexual slavery has the highest percentage, affecting both women and children. Women are lured with the promise of jobs in other countries, but are subjected to sexual servitude.