Elevate Difference

Reviews by Heather Leighton

Heather Leighton

Heather is a freelance translator by day and reads at night. From a feminist and environmental perspective, she blogs about the people, places and things that influence her and her family's life in an urban neighbourhood, where she is known for striking up conversations with complete strangers. She is interested in the viewpoints of people who are ignored by mainstream media and culture. You can find more of her writing at the Unexpected Twists and Turns.

Hey, Shorty!: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets

Difficulties concentrating in school, shame, depression, guilt, fear, low self-esteem, poor body image, and powerlessness are just some of the repercussions that victims of sexual harassment at school experience, according to research conducted by Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). This Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization works to “improve gender and race relations and socioeconomic conditions for [the] most vulnerable youth and communities of color.” Joanne N. Smith, Mandy Van Deven, and Megan Huppuch of GGE have collaboratively written Hey, Shorty!, which tells GGE’s story, while providing a model for teens to teach their peers what constitutes sexual harassment and how to prevent it. The book also gives activists, educators, parents and students a hands-on guide to combat sexual harassment and violence in their schools and neighborhoods.

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century is an anthology of influential essays written by top scholars that have defined the field of American girls’ history and culture over the last thirty years.

The Orphan Rescue

The Orphan Rescue opens in Sosnowiec, Poland in the late spring of 1937 as twelve-year-old Miriam and her grandfather take her younger brother David to an orphanage. Miriam’s grandparents have no other choice. The Depression has been a financially trying time for everyone, and when her locksmith grandfather injures his hand and can no longer work, the family is faced with a difficult decision.

The Social Media Survival Guide: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web

If you’re like me, you have a blog and a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Flickr account, but when someone starts to talk about CMS, metadata, Squidoo lenses, or the semantic web, you quickly tune out. We’re all aware of how vital the social web is for reaching new audiences, but we’re unsure of which tools are best suited to our online objectives, or which tools are the best investment of our time.

The Curious Case of the Communist Jell-O Box: The Execution of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg

What could possibly be the connection between imitation raspberry Jell-O, communism, and the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? I was intrigued. After all, what self-respecting leftist would not be interested in the case of the Rosenbergs, who at the height of the Red Scare were convicted of smuggling secrets to the Russians?

Make Me A Woman

It’s no stretch to say that mainstream media gives us a limited range of what women can be, so much so that when we find a book that actually reflects the complexity of womanhood, we’re ecstatic. Make Me A Woman is just that book. Readers will be able to readily relate to Vanessa Davis and the daily events of her life, while also encountering just enough difference to sink into some pure escapism.

Enough!: A Buddhist Approach to Finding Release from Addictive Patterns

Ordained by the Dalai Lama in 1995, Chönyi Taylor is a retired psychotherapist who fuses Buddhist teachings with western psychology to assist psychotherapists and health care professionals in helping individuals to break the pattern of addiction.

Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran’s 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price

Less than one year after Iranian demonstrators took to the streets to protest the fraudulent re-election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic, writer Afsaneh Moqadam tells the true story of Mohsen Abbaspour, a man in his early twenties who votes for the Reformist party and its leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Swept up in the euphoria of possible change, the once politically apathetic Mohsen finds himself alongside his friends and fellow reformists in the streets posing the greatest challenge to Iranian authorities since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Selves

Sonja Ahlers’ The Selves is a visual essay which combines collage, poetry, watercolor, calligraphy, prose and fabric. The result is a multi-layered and textured work that reveals something new every time you leaf through it. Although pastiche and mixed media immediately come to mind to describe Ahlers’ work, it may also be considered a new genre or a new way of looking at our lives as women in relation to mass media.

Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

In the original 1997 edition of Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber was the first to compare data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. In the last ten years since this edition was published, there has been rapid growth in the understanding of environmental links to human cancer and new published findings that corroborate the evidence Steingraber compiled in 1997. With a Ph.D.

The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won’t Learn in Business School

Has the glass ceiling been shattered? There is a widely accepted perception that it has. However, as author Selena Rezvani points out in chapter one of The Next Generation of Women Leaders, although women make up 46.5 percent of the U.S. workforce, they constitute only 15.7 percent of corporate officers.

The Spare Room

Many of us love our friends just as much as our family members. We often believe we would go to great lengths to protect them, as does Helen, the narrator of The Spare Room.

Aya: The Secrets Come Out (Volume Three)

Last summer, in dire need of some pure escapism, I stumbled upon the four-volume Aya comic book series. Inspired by author Marguerite Abouet’s childhood, this series takes us back to the late 1970s on the Ivory Coast to a suburb of Abidjan, Yopougon, known affectionately as Yop City to its residents. What initially piqued my interest was finding a series taken from the point of view of Aya, a nineteen-year-old African woman—indeed a rare occurrence.

Violent Partners: A Breakthrough Plan for Ending the Cycle of Abuse

Author Linda G. Mills is a scholar, lawyer, social worker, and the founder of the Center on Violence and Recovery at New York University. In Violent Partners, Mills challenges the tenets of the battered women’s movement.
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