Elevate Difference

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The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

What molding and stretching is required of a woman who chooses to better the quality of life of others over her own? Perhaps this type of self-sacrifice cannot be fathomed from the outside in. To be the devoted wife, the doting mother, the gracious hostess, the caring friend—where and when does she find the time to find herself? Within in her sharply defined world, Pippa Lee is everything to everyone who matters to her—to Herb, her husband thirty years her senior and a prominent publisher; to her grown children, twins; and to a small circle of friends, New York writers and artists.

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction

Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction offers a clear, thorough introduction to feminist theory.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness

We rarely have the opportunity to hear from people diagnosed with schizophrenia. As a result, the disease remains misunderstood and maligned, confused with multiple personality disorder, and the butt of several jokes. In writing The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks has, in part, set out to remedy this, and she has acquitted herself most admirably. Saks’s life is an interesting one.

Pornocracy

A beautiful woman enters a gay discotheque where she encounters a curious man who will follow her and spend three evenings exploring sexual brutality. Sounds like the plot of an erotic thriller guaranteed to tease and please, but was instead the story behind French filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s novel, Pornocracy.

One More Year

Sana Krasikov, in her first published collection, brings a filling and current group of short stories, and in them, creates honest characters whose interactions cannot be forgotten. Dramatic and awful at times, desperate and sparse, the stories move through time as each day does.

Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland

As we enter the final countdown to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, we will hear political pundits talk in red- and blue-state terms. The shorthand goes like this: blue states are progressive and urban, while red states are conservative and rural. And those purple states? Well, forget about those states; they're the bisexuals of electoral politics. We just don't know what to do with them. (wink) As someone who has spent most of her life participating in radical social movements in the red states I call home, I was hoping Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St.

The Late Bloomer's Revolution

Cute chick + NYC + media job + boyfriend troubles + comedically quirky friends and family + insipid metaphors + lightbulb moment resolution = book deal! Next, it will surely be opening at a multiplex near you. This read was so formulaic I had to remind myself that The Late Bloomer's Revolution is actually a memoir, not fictitious chick lit.

Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa

Wangari’s Trees of Peace is a beautifully imagined account, designed for young readers, of the life and career of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan scholar, activist, and environmentalist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her leadership of the Green Belt Movement and her resistance to deforestation. Often, “message books” like these underestimate kids’ level of sophistication and come across as preachy or cloying.

Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics In Hard Times

Brittany: I came to this collection with a lot of skepticism, mostly because I’ve grown quickly weary of the narrative about cyberactivism as a fun, accessible substitute for real-time work. I didn’t grow up with a particular activist model, but working as a communication and media scholar in recent years, my response to technology has been lukewarm at best, particularly when it is touted as a surrogate for working with people.

How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism

While leftists and gay rights activists occasionally discuss the notion that left wing battles, and particularly GLBTQ struggles, are too influenced by the religious right, the complaint is always frustrated and dismissive, never a serious consideration. Tina Fetner approaches the notion differently, addressing how the influence of religious right was, in fact, invaluable in shaping, and in rendering more powerful, the lesbian and gay movement.

On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam

Joyce Hoffman read a book about journalists who reported on American involvement in Vietnam in the sixties and wondered to herself, “Where are the women?” Considering that she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, a job teaching journalism to college students, and pens a biweekly op-ed column about journalism accuracy and fairness issues, it was not unlikely that she would write the book that would answer that question.

Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna

In Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship, Nuria Silleras-Fernandez examines the life of the Spanish queen, Maria de Luna, from her childhood amongst the sons and daughters of the royal court, to her successes and failures as queen in the Crown of Aragon until her death in 1406.

Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess

Almost everyone in America has heard of Anna, the famous upper class English lady who held her own with the King of Siam. What most people haven’t heard is the real story behind the better-known, fictionalized character. Susan Morgan has devoted over a decade to fleshing out the life of Anna Leonowens in Bombay Anna.

To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

Two a.m. When you are young, this is the time that bars close, new love springs unbidden in doorways, and entire dramas are played out in the time it takes a traffic light to change. When you are older, with marriage and children under your belt, it is the hour at which a ringing phone wakes you in terror, not annoyance; when a voice in the darkness signals illness, not invitation; when awakening in a strangely empty bed, one will know that something has gone awfully wrong with the person whose warmth still lingers in the covers.

My So-Called Freelance Life

Goodman has been freelancing for sixteen years at the time of publication. From the jump, her writing is accessible and fun. The follow-up to the somewhat well known The Anti-9-5 Guide: Practical Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, Goodman is once again onto something. What other how-to guides (repeatedly) use phrases like “get this freelance party started”?

Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction

Live Through This is truly a feminist work. It takes the expressed experiences from individuals coming from a wide array of backgrounds, who candidly and publicly share their experiences with issues labelled taboo and private, offering strength and conscience to readers everywhere. The format of this work is an anthology of pieces from some of the most groundbreaking American cultural producers.

Unaccustomed Earth

In this stunning collection of stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri takes the reader from the East Coast of the United States to India and Thailand and back, allowing us inside the homes and hotel rooms of warring lovers, conflicted families, and jealous roommates.

Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power

Men Speak Out is an important book for feminism.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

I hate to make the comparison, especially so quickly, but I will: Snoop is like Blink’s half brother. They aren’t technically related, but they live in similar worlds, have similar parents, and sometimes their content overlaps.

Brown Bagazine (Issue Four, Spring 2008)

Why do we read poetry and poetic prose? Some people like the unique language. Others recognize the “ordinary” described in a new way. We read poetry, ideally, to change, inside. Gypsy Daughter is a poetry chapbook and literary magazine publishing company. Their intention is to create an attractive physical venue for poets to reach their audience. Brown Bagazine, Gypsy Daughter’s quarterly literary magazine, is such a venue. I laughed with pleasure, when I first saw Brown Bagazine. What a clever idea, this is!

The Boss of You: Everything A Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run, and Maintain Her Own Business

Have you ever thought the world might be ready for your hand knit tea cozy business? The successful owners of Raised Eyebrow Web Studios, Lauren Bacon and Emira Mears, have written a business book for women entrepreneurs who want to define their own success: The Boss of You: Everything A Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run, and Maintain Her Own Business. According to the authors, this is the book they wish they'd had when starting their business.

Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America

It is refreshing to see find a doctor who is willing to question the establishment. In Worried Sick, Dr. Norman Hadler begins with the observation that the national health-care plans of “advanced” countries (other than the United States) cost a quarter of what Americans spend on health insurance, their survival rates are higher, and their citizens have more years of a better quality life.

When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison

Perhaps predictably, _When Mothers Kill: Interviews from Prison_ is not a fun or heartening read; it is a somewhat scholarly book featuring in-depth accounts of women who have murdered their own children.

When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition

Those of us who spend a lot of time lollygagging in the distant pass frequently encounter scenes of horror — people being tortured for their religious beliefs or identities, for example - and find ample evidence of our capacity for cruelty and inhumanity littering the landscape of human history.

Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics

Sexual historian Dagmar Herzog's book, Sex in Crisis, takes a look at the construction of sexuality after the sexual revolution in the mid-late 1900s. She analogizes the struggle to claim and determine legitimized, acceptable sexual practices (or absence thereof) to a war, which she believes the Christian Right is winning.

Patient Listening: A Doctor’s Guide

We talked for 45 minutes. It didn’t take much. You’re not asking them to be a guru, a Tibetan monk, a psychologist, or practice in a different field. Just ask one more question, two more questions. Somehow everything comes into place much quicker. This patient’s story captures the meaning of this collection of prose by twenty-four writers who have extensive experiences as patients.

Herizons Magazine (Spring 2008)

I am not a mainstream media fan, and I haven’t been one for a long time. I like to think that, as I have gotten older, my dynamic and sometimes contradictory critical feminist analysis (can you tell I was a sociology major?) has deepened from the angry polemics of a surly teenager to something a little bit more complex. But, I have to admit, politically speaking, I have been really lazy lately. As I withdrew my attention from celebrity news and headlines that held no interest for me, I wasn’t so conscientious about cultivating a batch of new, alternative news sources.

O, The Oprah Magazine Cookbook

Cooking with O, The Oprah Magazine Cookbook is an exploration of taste. The cookbook is arranged by the type of food—salads and appetizers, drinks, desserts, meats, vegetables—and the recipes come from a series of chefs who have contributed their favorites. Colorful photos and commentary from the chefs accompany the recipes. Unlike other cookbooks, there is no clear theme here.

Bright Shiny Morning

I have no beef with James Frey. I think he’s a talented writer; a zeitgeist of a generation; a younger and less punctuationally-correct Don DeLillo, of a sort; and I believe Oprah is a mean and deceitful ratings leech. I think memoir is a complicated genre at best, and I tend to believe most (if not all) of the story as told in this recent Vanity Fair article.

Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

As a newer reader of and listener to poetry, I often find it overly dramatic or flowery for my tastes. When I started reading Andrea Gibson’s collection, Pole Dancing To Gospel Hymns, I was not drawn to her lyrical love poems, which I read too cynically, but as I read on, I was drawn in by her humor, self-reflection, and earnest political analysis.
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