Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman

Despite the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan no one mistakes the rallying cry of today's Starbucks-toting, Hot Topic sporting protesters with the mobilized and systematic protests of the 1960s and 1970s. With not a small touch of nostalgia, those who were there for Vietnam, Civil Rights and Cambodia lament the laziness of present-day youth to fully posit themselves in the movement (as if that responsibility belongs solely to folks without many responsibilities), while young people today tune-out the nagging and lectures of their middle-class, once hippie parents.

Strange Piece of Paradise

When I picked up this memoir in early July, I was expecting to navigate a woman’s difficult journey from surviving a brutal, anonymous trauma into an enlightened state through making peace with the crime scene and its effected community. What I did not anticipate was the systemic analysis of social problems, personal depth and conscious processing that this book contains.

Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy

Why is contemporary African American literature — particularly that produced by black women — continually concerned with issues of respectability and propriety? Her first book, Private Lives, Proper Relations, Candace M. Jenkins looks at how African American writers express the political consequences of intimacy for the susceptible black subject.

Throw like a Girl

After being asked what she wanted for her readers to take away from Throw Like a Girl, Jean Thompson answered that she hoped they appreciate the “transforming power of literature, how can it remove us from the everyday world and let us see with new eyes.” And this book does just that: it takes us away from the everyday world and then painfully drops us back with the suspicion that this fiction is actually very real. The horrors of normalcy and the tedium of

Freeing Tammy: Women, Drugs, and Incarceration

Meet Tammara Johnson, an ex-19 year heroin addict, ex-prisoner and now a job development trainer for an in-patient drug treatment program. Freeing Tammy is the final book of a trilogy that discusses women, poverty and violence.

The Baby Lottery

Kathryn Trueblood takes on the weighty issues of motherhood in the age of abortion in her first novel, The Baby Lottery. (Trueblood is also the author of a book of short stories, The Sperm Donor’s Daughter.) Her characters are a circle of friends who have stayed together from college into their thirties. One is preparing for an abortion and coping with an overbearing husband. One is a nurse working with abortion providers.

Newcomer's Handbook for Moving to and Living in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin

Ah, how luck changes. I once lived with my favorite person in my favorite neighborhood in my favorite city in the world: Austin, Texas. It was just the two of us. Quiet, peaceful and weird. I also lived in what used to be my favorite apartment; it was perfect, until I unknowingly took in a flock of hungry, loved-starved fleas. Since that happened I have been fighting a constant war against these parasitic vermin. And it’s not just me.

Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl

“Soup can sometimes take the place of language...” Marusya Bociurkiw writes in Comfort Food for Breakups, and as the aroma of my mother’s broth, sipped to ease sickness, floods my tongue, I too hunger for my mother’s absent touch, for my young daughter knees, for my queer body. Born in Canada to Ukrainian exiles, Bociurkiw weaves stories interspersed with recipes, travels, and tales of other refugees.

Working the Skies: The Fast-Paced, Disorienting World of the Flight Attendant

In Working the Skies, Drew Whitelegg takes the interviews and study of a multitude of flight attendants and creates a readable, enjoyable tale of the perils and possibilities flight attendants face. The book is part psychology, part history and part cultural study with plenty of personal tales from retired and active flight attendants.

Sittin’ in a Tree

If you’re like me, you were totally shocked to learn that Sittin’ In a Tree is Juliana Hatfield’s eighteenth recording.

Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina

Hijas Americanas is a book that discusses the issues that Latinas raised in the United States face. It’s an extensive analysis of cultural differences and the different ways in which they assimilate, while still incorporating the values and traditions ingrained by family. Rosie Molinary conducted an extensive survey (which she includes at the end of the book) and based her book both on her findings and on her experiences growing up.

Newcomer's Handbook for Moving to and Living in the San Francisco Bay Area

The Newcomer's Handbook for Moving to and Living in the San Francisco Bay Area covers just about every aspect of living in and around San Francisco. I mean everything!

American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

"When the annals of our era are written, the United States will… come to be defined as a prison state." Not to spoil the ending, but this is the last, haunting sentence of American Furies, Sasha Abramsky's scathing indictment of the U.S. prison system. If you still believe that America is a just democracy where everyone is treated equal, then you really have to read this book.

Global Feminisms

Global Feminisms is a beautifully compiled collection of feminist art from all over the world, literally. Instead of focusing on works from the past, however, the earliest of the pieces in this book date from the year 1990 and looks forward to the future of feminism and art. The countless paintings, sculptures, pieces of installation art, photographs, portraits, etc. come from fifty countries and all continents (excluding Antarctica), and challenges the notion that feminism is Western-centric and male defined.