Elevate Difference

Reviews by Erin Schowalter

Love Translated

Love Translated follows a group of men from North America and Europe as they tour the Ukraine on a trip organized by an international dating service that links male clients with “letter order brides.” Over the course of their ten-day trip, the men travel to several cities, judge a beauty pageant of women who have joined the agency, attend social events, and go on “one-on-one” dates (accompanied, normally, by a translator).

Lost Girls: Sex and Death in Renaissance Florence

Founded in 1554 by a group of charitable women who called themselves the Compagnia della Pietà, the Casa della Pietà, or Compassion House, was built in Florentine to shelter girls who had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents. The goal of the home was to keep children and adolescent girls from turning to (or being forced into) prostitution in the absence of familial support, and to provide them with the possibility of a dowry and marriage. Despite these good intentions, only 202 of the 526 girls and women who resided in the home survived their stay.

The Hanging of Susanna Cox: The True Story of Pennsylvania’s Most Notorious Infanticide and the Legend That’s Kept It Alive

The story of Susanna Cox, as detailed in Patricia Earnest Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corinne Earnest’s The Hanging of Susanna Cox, nearly perfectly follows the trajectory of the seduction of the mid-to-late eighteenth century: a naive girl is lured from her family, “seduced” (often, in actuality, raped), left by her lover (or rapist), and left to die alone. Seduction novels were simultaneously didactic, propagandistic, prurient, and hugely popular.

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

Susan E. Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions tracks the changes in family size ideals and the associated changes in family planning and women’s roles in early America. It is unsurprising that Klepp’s work highlights the limitations to women’s agency in family planning.

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank

When researching medical or social history, one of the things that often becomes apparent is the level of mystery that surrounded women’s bodies and bodily functions. This mystery and speculation is the subject of Randi Hutter Epstein’s Get Me Out. As the title suggests, Hutter Epstein, a medical journalist, presents an overview of ideas related to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth spanning from antiquity to the modern day.

Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen

Reverend Jen Miller—artist, troll museum proprietor, elf-ear wearer, and reverend in the Universal Life Church—reprints and adapts the essays she wrote during her two-year stint as the writer for Nerve.com’s "I Did it for Science" column in Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen. As the name suggests, the essays feature Miller performing experiments related to sex on herself and her friends.

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change

David Holmgren, one of the founders of the permaculture concept, turns his attention to forecasting the results of changes to energy and climate in Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change. The first half of the book provides an overview of the history of energy, energy futures, and the relationships between climate change and peak oil.

My Little Red Book

When something is already a little bit scary, feeling like you are alone in the experience or that it is something you should not talk about makes it all the more terrifying. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s My Little Red Book seeks to demystify and universalize one such potentially scary experience: the first period.
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