Elevate Difference

Reviews of University of California Press

The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

Psychiatrist, mother, and grandmother Barbara Almond's provocative new study makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about what she terms “the dark side of motherhood.” The negative feelings a mother inevitably has toward her child, however loving she may be, and the painful conflicts these feelings can engender, is a topic still too often taboo in American culture.

Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War

The stories of eight women’s lives, four Iraqi and four American, establish the framework for an examination of the gendered phases of war. Nimo is a beauty salon owner in Baghdad who keeps her business open through blackouts and listens to what the women there really think. Emma is a mother in Texas, urged to let her second son join the military during wartime. Maha, Danielle, Safah, Kim, Shatha, and Charlene all have stories that in telling offer a deeper look into not only their circumstances, but into the state of the world and of the ravages of wartime.

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types.

Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

In Offending Women, ethnographer and sociologist Lynne Haney takes readers on a journey into “a world that few people would otherwise have access to”: the everyday reality of the lives of incarcerated women. She introduces readers to incarcerated mothers who are housed together with their children and serving terms in community-based prisons, a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread in the US.

Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan

Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan is a culmination of professor Lieba Faier's fieldwork in the late 1990s in the Nagano region of Japan, specifically Central Kiso. For a few years, Faier lived in the area, interviewing both the Japanese natives and the Filipina women who came to Japan under entertainment visas.

Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, And Lipstick Lesbians

California: Land of the free, the brave, and the gay. This heart-lifting literary biopsy of gay rights’ progression in Southern California (Los Angeles, specifically) is a delight to read. For those of you who have ever stood in the face of adversity, protest poster in hand, Gay L.A. will remind you exactly why you did so.

The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

Before starting this book, prepare yourself. Bales and Soodalter take an in depth look at slavery in America, and they reveal some dark stories that some people may find too disturbing. Slavery, unfortunately, did not end in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. It exists throughout the world through house, field, and sexual servitude.

A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

Preeminent feminist Buddhism scholar Rita M. Gross’ A Garland of Feminist Reflections is an indispensable collection of her best collected writing from the past forty years. Drawing together theory, philosophy, and religious exploration, Gross’ self-selected anthology is deeply thought provoking and can serve as an introduction to her vital scholarship, or a necessary refresher on important concepts and ideas.

What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq

March 20, 2009 marked the six-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Although the half a dozen years of occupation must seem like an extended nightmare from which Iraqis are anxious to awake, for many young Americans an occupied Iraq is the only Iraq they have ever known. This is precisely why Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt’s research could not have come at a better time.

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture

The short disclaimer is this: I grew up in a family filled with the Holy Spirit. My grandfathers were, respectively, a theology professor and a youth and music minister. One of my uncles, after making his name founding a Phoenix-area megachurch in the '90s, currently works as a professional church-grower, teaching other pastors how to rapidly expand their soon-to-be behemoth congregations of believers.

A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

Memoir can be a tricky genre, with nothing holding its premise together other than the author’s truth. In Marcia Tucker’s case, being an artist and curator also makes her one hell of a writer, a woman with a keen ability to spot details and covey her passion to a larger audience. A Short Life of Trouble is a breezy, enjoyable read as it traces Tucker’s fortuitous rise through the New York art scene, parallel with the surge of second wave feminism in the 1960s.

Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess

Almost everyone in America has heard of Anna, the famous upper class English lady who held her own with the King of Siam. What most people haven’t heard is the real story behind the better-known, fictionalized character. Susan Morgan has devoted over a decade to fleshing out the life of Anna Leonowens in Bombay Anna.

Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help

From Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis for curing psychopathology by means of talk therapy, to spilling one’s guts on Oprah’s couch or skyping into her soul series webcast, we all just really want to know (dammit!): who am I and why am I here? Saving the Modern Soul examines the language and practice of psychology, essentially, from an American cultural perspective.

The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity

In The New Voices of Islam, Mehran Kamrava compiles a selection of writings from Muslim reformists whose voices have been silenced and marginalized for much too long.

Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto

In her recently translated book Breaking the Silence, Fadela Amara attempts to rework and redefine feminism as it relates to her specific time and place. As a Muslim girl of Algerian immigrant parents growing up in the projects, Amara’s experience of feminism as the term is traditionally defined by western academics was non-existent. In fact, her book critiques the very term as it exists now, perceived by her to be owned by the white middle and upper-class women who coined it.
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