Elevate Difference

Books

From Rage to Courage: Answers to Readers' Letters

Alice Miller alleges that "most people (ninety-five percent of the world population) were beaten as children." You might think these are some pretty hefty charges: so did I.

The Fat Studies Reader

The Fat Studies Reader is a collection of groundbreaking essays in this interdisciplinary field. The book is divided into six sections that include a historical overview of fatness, fat studies in health and medicine, social inequality, discrimination in popular culture, and embracing fatness.

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010

It’s truly a shame that poetry is so often thought of as inaccessible, hopelessly and purposefully snarled with obscurity and flabby with rococo intellectualism. Great poetry should work on many levels, and thus appeal to a wide audience from those who appreciate it for its pure beauty and those that delight the complexity of further analysis. Maxine Kumin is a poet whose entire oeuvre is rooted in what she knows: her farm in New Hampshire, where she works in the ground, keeps horses.

Moregasm: Babeland’s Guide to Mind-Blowing Sex

If you’re looking for a book about anything and everything related to sex, look no further than Moregasm. It starts with the basics—getting to know the lay of the land on a woman’s body. It moves on to a thorough discussion of orgasms, masturbation, and toys; a chapter on men; an exploration of what can turn you on; a how-to on sex with the hand or mouth; penis-in-vagina intercourse; safe sex practices; and a question and answer section.

American Thighs: The Sweet Potato Queens' Guide to Preserving Your Assets

Jill Connor Browne, the self-proclaimed Sweet Potato Queen, is fifty-five and lives in Jackson, Mississippi. Her newest book, American Thighs, is an amusing but lightweight look at aging from an older Southern woman's point of view.

American Catfight: Political Wisdom for Women and Other Thoughts Towards Feminine Statecraft in the 21st Century

The biggest obstacle to women, according to Maryann Breschard, is other women. In American Catfight, Breschard posits that even the best-intentioned feminists have, along the way, exploited and undermined other women in their mad dash to power.

Conversate Is Not A Word: Getting Away From Ghetto

I admit it: I bristle when my students talk about conversating. At the same time, I try to catch myself, remembering that decades back no one spoke of googling or used the word text as a verb either. Language, like social mores, constantly changes. African American author, provocateur, blogger, and lawyer Jam Donaldson understands this, and her message is simple: Everyone, but especially people of color, needs to know the difference between slang and proper grammar, and everyone needs to take responsibility for the things they can control.

The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure In The 25 Years After 50

It turns out that Madonna is not the queen of reinvention. That title belongs to Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, who truly is reinvention royalty. Lawrence-Lightfoot’s The Third Chapter offers a wise and uplifting guide to creating a new life or to drastically improving the one you’ve got.

September Fair: A Murder-by-Month Mystery

Librarian and small-town reporter Mira James discovers the dead body of the latest Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, while covering the Minnesota State Fair for the local newspaper. Milkfed Mary is teenaged Ashley Pederson. Mira is covering a carving of Ashley’s head in butter as part of the Queen of the Dairy ceremony when the lights go out in the Dairy building. A few moments later Mira finds Ashley on the floor of a refrigerated booth, her skin a strange shade of red. Ashley’s body is the fifth Mira has discovered in the last few months.

Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop but Never Get Off

Good travel writing is hard to come by because it requires a convergence of several elements: a catchy hook, entertaining prose, historical context in just the right doses, and a keen eye for what is interesting about people and places visited. The ability to impeccably execute these essential components is what separates the sacred from the profane.

Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: Politics, Identity and Faith in New Immigrant Communities

Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana, a collection of essays on the religious activities and identity formation of immigrants to the United States, is the fruit of a four-year study conducted by researchers from the Religion and Immigration Project (TRIP) at the University of San Francisco.

New Collected Poems

Combining eleven of Eavan Boland’s books, New Collected Poems presents readers with her finest work. Boland, a contemporary Irish poet, guides readers across thirty years of her work in this 307 page tome. During the journey, one begins to traverse tradition, grasp snippets of myth, and peer inside the life of this extraordinary woman. Most of Boland’s poems are written in traditional forms, which give her work a smooth consistency.

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts

Possibly some magnetic force field that beckons people to its promises of adventure, wealth, and sun blazed days, there is a pull toward California. Be it a fight for survival, a lost treasure, or ability to inspire, California and its sacred deserts are full of mysticism and brighter futures. On the other hand, California's offerings are in no way a given. The obstacles, being weather related or competitive in nature, are likely to break a person's soul.

Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity

Makeovers are everywhere in today’s society, though I had never really given much thought to them until I read Brenda R. Weber’s Makeover TV. Weber points out that we are making over everything: bodies, houses, cars, hair, lifestyles, wardrobes, and even pets. Now that I am more sensitive to it, I realized we seem to be obsessed with change.

The Pistachio Seller

“How does a woman fall in love?” The opening line of Reem Bassiouney’s The Pistachio Seller is dangerously full of clichéd melodrama and trite gender assumptions; however, Bassiouney avoids these pitfalls by presenting complicated characters who exhibit the complexity of religion, love, and belief. Bassiouney explains the significance of the pistachio in an Author’s Note, which reveals the historical significance of the pistachio and ties the nut to a very

Creating a Life: The Memoir of a Writer and Mom in the Making

Some books are pure pleasure, an escape, and others give us more to ponder. Some books allow us to reach down deep to the hidden place of our most private thoughts.

The Bride of E

Mary Jo Bang’s amazing new collection of poetry, The Bride Of E, is vivid with haunting images. The poems in the first part of the book follow their lead from the alphabet, beginning with “ABC Plus E: Cosmic Aloneness Is The Bride Of Existence.” This disturbingly truthful poem is anything but simple. It mirrors the loneliness one can feel even in large crowds.

The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of an Anthropological Controversy

What do Phil Donohue, a New Zealand ethnologist, three anthropologist husbands, and a small handful of Samoan girls all have in common? The answer is: Margaret Mead and their roles in a debate that has rocked cultural anthropology since 1983. The Trashing of Margaret Mead is a fine, funny, discriminating, and at times quite disturbing book.

Remarkable Creatures

I'm a huge fan of Tracy Chevalier. Like a lot of people, I began with Girl with a Pearl Earring, and have since made my way through all but one of her other books. So of course I leapt at the chance to sample her newest offering. Like all her books, Remarkable Creatures begins with something tangible.

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore

Writing a review for a book like The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal is not a simple task by any means. On the one hand, I want to be as straightforward as possible and simply give my impressions of this one particular piece of writing without going into the issue of prostitution and whether or not it degrades women.

Cleopatra: A Biography

Cleopatra is a cipher, an enigmatic and historically remote figure reimagined until she has become, for much of the world and for much of modern history, the apotheosis of desire, representative of the potency of feminine allure. As with the search for the historical Jesus, separating the real figure from the myth is complicated not only by our fascination with all the artistic interventions and the millennia of (mis)representation but also by the paucity of hard evidence.

Little Venus

Little Venus, a collection of poems by Carla Drysdale, is at once hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. The poems are an autobiographical account of child abuse, sexual abuse, and a dysfunctional family, yet Drysdale manages to strike the difficult balance between beauty and horror.

My Estonia: Passport Forgery, Meat Jelly Eaters, and Other Stories

Long Island native Justin Petrone, like many young people, wanted to shake up his life after graduating from college. He wasn’t sure how, but he managed to do it in a big way. My Estonia tells his true story of a life-altering year of love and timeliness. “Finland really was my last hope.

Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives

Women, Gender and Disaster provides a comprehensive overview of the role gender plays in various disaster situations. Case studies and essays are divided into four parts—Understanding Gender Relations in Disaster, Gendered Challenges and Responses in Disasters, Women's Organised Initiatives, and Gender-Sensitive Disaster Risk Reduction—to further develop the myriad of issues within gender and disaster.

Uptown

The dark psyche of greed gone wild is at the heart of Uptown. In this energetic and sexy page turner of a story about the high stakes world of Manhattan real estate, winners take all—but the price turns out to be far more than they negotiated for...

Contents of a Mermaid’s Purse

Phoebe Tsang’s Contents of a Mermaid's Purse is somewhat like a real purse a modern woman might have: familiar and, at the same time, exotic—and so is what it holds. Dumping the purse’s contents onto the table to sift through proves to be an exercise in strange beauty—an alluring siren’s call fulfilled.

Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919

Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical, 1832-1919 is a plethora of facts, evidence, and tightly woven themes that are well-researched by Harris, yet the book isn’t boring or dry. I found it inspirational and enraging at the same time. Women of the past made it easier for women today by tirelessly battling for women’s rights (and for men who were not white property owners). Walker was a dutiful and energetic soldier.

Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America

In this well-written ethnography, Gay Fatherhood, Ellen Lewin examines the choices and the decisions of gay fathers in America, focusing particularly on men who choose to become fathers as gay men, rather than coming out after having had children in a different-sex marriage.

Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

In Girl Zines, Alison Piepmeier elegantly chronicles the emergence in the early 1990s of zines: a complex, multifaceted phenomenon aligned with third wave feminism, and a powerful and unruly articulation of the same cultural moment that produced riot grrrls. It may also have been the last gasp of the manuscript culture—since, some would say, eclipsed by the blogosphere and electronic media—as a pervasive form of underground radical expression.

Catch Light

When I flipped over to the back cover of Sarah O’Brien’s recent collection of poetry, Catch Light, it was both startling and encouraging to see the resemblance.
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