Elevate Difference

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Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction. This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in.

Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide

In the third edition of this book, Alan Rosenbaum has collected a selection of brilliant, incendiary, and questionable essays addressing a sensitive yet much argued question. To quote Israel W.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

If you want to read a book that is punch-you-in-the-gut beautiful, then pick up Yoko Ogawa's novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. This novel is a careful meditation on memory and communication.

Anthropology and Public Health: Bridging Differences in Culture and Society, Second Edition

With the space allotted, I couldn’t render the titles and names of the fifty-some authors of the twenty-five chapters that make up this exciting collection. It is called a second edition of the earlier volume edited by Robert Hahn, but it is entirely new. It overlaps only by the still-compelling final chapter, George Foster’s 1987 critique of international health bureaucracies (which I read in grad school).

Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia and India

In Hollow Bodies, Susan Dewey travels to Armenia, Bosnia, and India to look at the institutional responses to sex trafficking in the three different cultural and governmental contexts. Armenia is plagued by poverty, unemployment and a poor quality of life that encourages migration. Bosnia is recovering from a violent war in which many women were victims of rape and forced into prostitution.

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture

The short disclaimer is this: I grew up in a family filled with the Holy Spirit. My grandfathers were, respectively, a theology professor and a youth and music minister. One of my uncles, after making his name founding a Phoenix-area megachurch in the '90s, currently works as a professional church-grower, teaching other pastors how to rapidly expand their soon-to-be behemoth congregations of believers.

An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers

Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers will inspire many to pick up a sketchbook and try their hand at drawing the world around them.  Gregory explains his reasoning for writing this book as something he had been searching for since he started drawing as a boy.

Roaming Kyrgyzstan: Beyond the Tourist Track

As American foreign travel is concerned, we are more likely to head to Cancun for spring break, or across the border in Canada for some duty-free shopping—not to Kyrgyzstan.

The Dark Red Amulet: Oral Instructions on the Practice of Vajrakilaya

It’s been a while since I read a book that came with a warning label: "As with all Vajrayana practices, Vajrakilaya should not be practiced without receiving an empowerment or reading transmission directly from a qualified lineage master.

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into The Far Realms Of Lust And Longing

Daniel Bergner’s new work on sexuality, The Other Side of Desire, garnered a considerable amount of press before it was released thanks to an adapted excerpt from the book published in the New York Times under the title, “What Do Women Want?” Many feminists were disgruntled by the piece, which included University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) professor Marta Meana’s insistence of narcissism in the r

2666

Epic in its proportions, 2666 is a modern day mystery novel more akin to James Joyce than anything on the shelves by John Grisham. The five sections that comprise the book are set around the world, yet the heart of the narratives remains bound to the fictional Mexican border town of Santa Teresa.

Secret Son

Having read Laila Lalami’s short fiction collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I was thrilled to find out she was working on her first novel, Secret Son.

Living in the Face of Death

This profound collection of Tibetan Buddhist writing on the subject of death and transcendence is a gorgeous initiation into the thoughts shared by those that follow this religion/set of beliefs. Mullin chose a variety of writings that approach the inevitable by former Dalai Lamas, yogis, mystics and spiritual teachers. As a whole the collected works are easily digestible and clear in their impact.

Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan

A deluge of books on Islamic fundamentalism had swamped the world's bookshelves following the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Some 100 books and 5,600 articles were written on the subject, many focussing on the lives of Afghan women under Taliban rule.

American Women Leaders: 1,560 Current Biographies

American Women Leaders is an ultimate resource of all things women. If you consider yourself a feminist or are interested in women’s empowerment, this is a great coffee table book to own. American Women Leaders features biographies of over 1,500 women who are positively impacting others.

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles Over Gay Rights

Gary Mucciaroni’s Same Sex, Different Politics offers a useful, though ultimately limited, account of the LGBT rights movement. Trained as a political scientist, Mucciaroni’s interests lie in the varying degrees of success and failure over LGBT public policy issues. He questions why certain policy issues (such as adoption) fare better than others (most notably marriage equality).

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

Let me begin this review by professing my support for Jessica Valenti's overarching purpose in The Purity Myth: to expose the trope of sexual purity as deeply entrenched in American culture and to demonstrate the harmfulness of this trope on young American women.

Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot

Previous portrayals of Mormonism in popular media have been widely negative, expressed primitively through cheap jokes about polygamy. Recently, with the emergence of the HBO show Big Love, a positive light has been shown on the teachings of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saints movement.

Feminist and Queer Performance: Critical Strategies

Feminist and Queer Performance is a collection of eleven previously published essays by Sue-Ellen Case, a Professor of Theatre and Critical Studies at UCLA. Exploring topics as diverse as butch-femme aesthetics, cyber-minstrelsy, W.O.W.

The Séance

John Harwood’s The Séance combines all the great elements of a classic Victorian ghost story: Dilapidated mansions, noises in the walls, flickers of candlelight in a darkened window, and a fog rolling in across a menacing landscape—all the workings for a good scary read. The Séance is told from the perspectives of three dif

Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale

Maybe the current economic meltdown the world-over has got me down, but I found Chris Ayres’ Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale a hard pill to swallow. Could it be that the time for cautionary tales has long passed? Every other fiction new release, it seems, touches upon environmental disaster, or endless war, or the disaster wrought by people living en masse beyond their means; this book touches upon all three.

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life by Catherine Clinton, is a fascinating account of this very complicated and very misunderstood woman. I knew little about Mary Todd prior to reading this book and what I did know was mostly based on my own mythical ideas about Honest Abe and his wife Mary.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

I am not the biggest fan of self-help books. I began reading this book to validate the quarter-life crisis I have been having for quite some time. My definition of a quarter-life crisis is a person who, in his or her twenties, realizes they have been sleeping through their lives while fulfilling the dreams of their parents, culture, or class. Consequently, they awake into a reality that has nothing to do with what they really want, creating a critical turning point brought on at the speed of warp. I am in my thirties and what can I say, I’m a late bloomer.

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering

Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering is a collection of essays by twenty different women who are all raising children in a multicultural environment. The children in this book mainly fall into three categories: they are of mixed racial heritage, they are being raised in a country to which their parents have immigrated, or they have been adopted by parents from another culture.

Misogyny and the Emcee: Sex, Race, and Hip Hop

In light of recent events, when speaking about the state of misogyny in hip-hop, it would be inappropriate to ignore the media frenzy surrounding Rihanna and Chris Brown, each sweetly young, fabulously charming, and wildly successful hip-hop stars in their own right. If you don’t read the CNN ticker, or guiltily sneak a peek at People.com, you could have missed the news that Brown allegedly assaulted his girlfriend the night before the Grammys.

Shalom India Housing Society

Shalom India Housing Society is an apartment complex formed in the wake of the shocking riots of 2002 by Erza, an Indian Bene Israel Jew and a contractor by profession. The Society is formed to allow Jews to maintain a separate identity in multi-religious India. The Bene Israel communities trace their descent to Jews who escaped persecution two thousand years ago and were shipwrecked in Alibaug in Mumbai. Since then they have made India their home.

The Kept Man

One thing I don't expect to find in a chick lit-type book* is a line like this: "The thing about fucking on coke is, afterward, there's no rolling over and going to bed." Oh. I'd never thought of that.

Boyfriend University: Take Advantage of Your Man and Learn While You Can

In 1994 I was sitting around a bonfire in my combat boots and a thrift store granny dress, drinking homebrew and wondering how many years it had been since I’d used a razor, when someone handed me a pamphlet from the 1930s about how to be a “good wife.” And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—it was demeaning and yet terribly serious all at once, and we laughed with a combination of horror and relief that the world had changed so much since our grandmothers were young.  This particular memory came flooding back to me when I received _[Boyfriend University](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/

30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account

Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account is one of the most accurately named books that I’ve read recently. This book is not a traditional travel narrative, and it gains so much from that. The twists and turns inherent in Sydney’s history and people are developed throughout the book not only in the words, but in the style of the book. It is indeed a wildly distorted account, and an unapologetic one.

Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status

Labels—freak, geek, wigger, poser, prep, to name just a few—are plentiful and ever-expanding, flourishing in the fertile social grounds of high school and college. Often, labels are used against individuals, assigned and branded as tools of marginalization and preservation of social hierarchies. Amy C.
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