Elevate Difference

Reviews by Eleanor J. Bader

Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, New York-based activist, teacher, and writer. She writes a monthly column about the anti-abortion right-wing--called Stoking Fire--for RHRealityCheck.org. She also contributes to The Brooklyn Rail, ontheissuesmagazine.com, The Progressive, Truthout.org, and other feminist and left-leaning blogs and publications. In addition to compulsive reading and writing, she is a long-distance urban walker, photographer, and movie-goer.

Magical Things: Spring 2008 at the American Academy in Rome

Brooklyn, New York artist Meridith McNeal continually wandered the streets of Rome during her Spring 2008 residency as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy. As she ambled into every nook and cranny of the city, from winding alleys to bustling streets, she took dozens of spectacular photos—of buildings and people, as well as of flowers, trees, plants, statues, monuments, chandeliers, light fixtures, and scrumptious looking food.

Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy

The opening shots in Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, a fifty-minute documentary narrated by Edwidge Danticat, reveal an island paradise: turquoise waters, green hills, beautiful, and colorful flowers. But these scenes don’t last long. Almost immediately, we’re introduced to numerous working-class and poor women, nicknamed poto mitan, Creole for the pillar around which everything revolves.

Not That Kind of Girl

Carlene Bauer was a seven-year-old child when her mother became a born-again Christian, catapulting the family into a regimen that put avoiding devilish distraction front and center.

My Life in a Nutshell (10/10/2009)

Obie award winner Hanne Tierney’s latest work, My Life in a Nutshell, doesn’t shy away from big themes. Death, friendship, jealousy, love, lust, mourning, and carrying on in the face of life’s abundant whammies make appearances in this innovative, clever, and totally absorbing forty-five-minute puppet show for adults.

Little Bird of Heaven

Oates' thirty-sixth novel grapples with familiar themes: the rocky underside of marriage, racial injustice, childhood trauma, sexual obsession, and the ways gender plays out among various subsets of the U.S. working classes. The story is set in fictitious Sparta, New York, a once thriving town seven-to-eight hours north of Manhattan. A former center of industry, the area was left high-and-dry when the factories that employed almost everyone relocated in the 1970s.

The Supremes: A Saga of Motown Dreams, Success, and Betrayal

Mark Ribowsky did not interview singer Diana Ross or Berry Gordy, the founder and iron-fisted ruler of Motown Records, for this unauthorized look at The Supremes’ rise and fall.

Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation

Like all good memoirs of the 1960s and early ‘70s, Smash the Church, Smash the State! takes readers back to a time when revolution seemed imminent. Change was in the air and the fifty-one essays comprising Tommi Avicolli Mecca’s important anthology vividly capture the heady exhilaration of queer activists on both U.S. coasts as the possibility of being out-and-proud became increasingly tangible. The book is both a look back and a look forward.

Silence Not, A Love Story

Everyone loves a love story, especially one with a happy ending, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper’s latest play, a forty-four-scene two-act, is a whopper. Silence Not, A Love Story tells the improbable tale—based on a true story—of Gisa Peiper, a young Jewish student stifled by religious Orthodoxy, and Paul Konopka, a Catholic craftsman, who met in late-1920s Germany while working with the anti-fascist International Socialist Combat League, known as the ISK.

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’ thirty-fifth novel in forty-five years.

Call Me Ahab

Anne Finger’s award-winning Call Me Ahab showcases a plethora of historical and literary characters—each of whom is in some way disabled—and imagines new scenarios for their lives. It’s an exciting concept and while several of the stories in the nine-story collection left me cold, Finger is to be lauded for her originality. Her talent is particularly vivid in "Vincent." Here, Finger brings Vincent Van Gogh into the late twentieth century.

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine

“You have to be very aggressive to be a sculptor,” Louise Bourgeois announces at the start of The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, a fascinating, but flawed, ninety-nine-minute documentary about the Parisian-born artist’s life and work. Later, she confesses that aggression alone is insufficient and implies that trauma and loss are equally essential. “I make in my work unconscious connections.

I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing

Kyria Abrahams’ searing, if flawed, memoir about growing up in a deeply-observant family of Jehovah’s Witnesses calls to mind Karl Marx’s quip that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Her original voice is by turns funny, whiny, clear-eyed, and churlish as she chronicles the Witness’ blind obedience to religious dogma. Abrahams’ writing is deft, even evocative, as she vividly describes the purple haze in which her community languishes.

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir

By the time Patricia Harman finished writing The Blue Cotton Gown, she was no longer working as a midwife. Instead, soaring malpractice fees had caused The Women’s Health Clinic of Torrington, West Virginia, a practice Harman runs with her husband, Dr.

Freedom From Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization That's Winning the Fight Against Poverty

The truism tells us that if you give a woman a fish, she’ll eat for a day, but if you teach her to fish, she’ll eat for a lifetime. This philosophy undergirds the work of Building Resources Across Communities (BRAC), an international NGO located in Bangladesh. The group began in 1972 as the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee, but quickly outgrew the moniker.

A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them. Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives.
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