Elevate Difference

Books

©ontent: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future

He’s been dubbed the “William Gibson of his generation,” but Cory Doctorow is more than a cyberpunk novelist or futurist. He’s an activist, a Creative Commons advocate, tech blogger, and journalist. I don’t come to Doctorow’s non-fiction work by way of his sci-fi novels.

Magdalene and the Mermaids

After reading Elizabeth Kate Switaj’s collection of poetry Magdalene and the Mermaids, I decided I wanted to know a bit more about her. It turns out that she grew up in Seattle, spent years in Asia teaching English and traveling, lived briefly in Brooklyn, and is now back in Seattle.

Mudbound

Mudbound, the first novel by Hillary Jordan, is all about tension. Race, family, marriage, class, identity are all buzzing, pressing in the narrative, and all of them feed into the greatest tension of all: the classic survival story of man versus nature. The first few pages describe two brothers scrambling to dig a makeshift grave ahead of an impending storm. This scene sets the tone and becomes, in many ways, a vivid metaphor for the entire narrative.

The Music Teacher

The Music Teacher is a story of failure. It is the story of what could have been, but wasn’t—because of neglect, because of abuse, or for the simple reason that not everyone succeeds. Most people fail. Protagonist Pearl Swain is one of these failures. Swain was a gifted violinist, but her father hated (and feared) her passion for music so strongly that he burned her violin in a backyard fire.

Kilobyte Couture: Geek Chic Jewelry to Make From Easy-to-Find Computer Components

As someone who has recently begun making and designing jewelry using the standard materials—such as beads, chains, ribbons—I was impressed to see a book about jewelry made from computer parts. Yes, that’s right, computer parts. Written by former Etsy seller Brittany Forks, Kilobyte Couture touts itself as "geek chic", but I think many of the designs and styles are simply chic!

A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives

When I read the back cover of A Narrative Compass, I thought it might be something nice to read before going to bed at night, and luckily, I was right. The texts this collection contains are great bedtime stories: attention grabbing, short, and self-contained. Reading it is a little bit like having all of your closest friends over for a gathering to talk about the stories you treasure from your youth, and how they have influenced you.

Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

In 1965, Billy Wayne Sinclair accidentally killed a store clerk with a shot fired aimlessly into the dark after a robbery he had committed. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair for his crime, however unintentional. Sinclair initially dealt with his death sentence through denial, swallowing the tranquilizers the guards on death row dispensed to keep the inmates pacified.

Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuilt and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast

Hurricane Katrina was one of those events that it was impossible not to be affected by because the images we all watched on our televisions and in the newspapers were so horrible. There was a sense of shock that U.S. citizens could be treated so poorly in their own country. Yet this outrage seems to have faded along with the general public’s memory of the storm. Hurricane Katrina will forever alter the course of history in New Orleans and the life paths of thousands of families from the region.

The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business

Ask yourself this question: what is your unique quality or attribute that makes you an asset to a company? Can you answer that? Whether you are a recent graduate or have been laid off from your job, you need to know how to market yourself and create your own brand.

The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today

Before starting this book, prepare yourself. Bales and Soodalter take an in depth look at slavery in America, and they reveal some dark stories that some people may find too disturbing. Slavery, unfortunately, did not end in the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. It exists throughout the world through house, field, and sexual servitude.

Vegan Brunch: Homestyle Recipes Worth Waking Up For - From Asparagus Omelets to Pumpkin Pancakes

Vegan = tofu = dreadlocks = body odor = weird. This review is not about debunking the vegan stereotype equation, and all its variations, but rather about introducing the equal opportunity indulgence: brunch. In a first read through, Isa Chandra Moskowitz's cookbook Vegan Brunch is nearly perfect.

Old World Daughter, New World Mother

Taking us from her childhood to the present, Maria Laurino explores what it’s like to be an Italian American woman through the lens of identity, feminism, ethnicity, motherhood, pregnancy, and economics in Old World Daughter, New World Mother_. Laurino unveils the restrictions she faced as a feminist daughter, as well as all that a traditionally Italian upbringing entails.

Repeat After Me

Rachel DeWoskin’s debut novel, Repeat After Me, is a cultural love story between two people whose lives briefly intertwine. Afterwards, they are never the same again. The story follows the relationship between a young neurotic ESL teacher in Manhattan, Aysha Silvermintz, and her student, Da Ge, a mysterious, silent, Chinese national who comes to the U.S.

Atmospheric Disturbances

In some cases, you may be midway through a story, novel, or film before realizing you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. He or she is biased, withholding information, or mentally unstable. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s disturbing story “The Yellow Wallpaper” springs to mind as just one example.) In Atmospheric Disturbances, the debut novel by Rivka Galchen, it is apparent early on that the main character, psychiatrist Dr.

Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American at Home and Abroad

Laughing without an Accent is Firoozeh Dumas’s second book, after her debut memoir Funny in Farsi. Dumas is an Iranian-American who writes about the similarities and differences in Iranian cultures through her own experiences growing up in Iran and America.

Call Me Ahab

Anne Finger’s award-winning Call Me Ahab showcases a plethora of historical and literary characters—each of whom is in some way disabled—and imagines new scenarios for their lives. It’s an exciting concept and while several of the stories in the nine-story collection left me cold, Finger is to be lauded for her originality. Her talent is particularly vivid in "Vincent." Here, Finger brings Vincent Van Gogh into the late twentieth century.

The Return of Depression Economics

Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics is one of the most accessible reads on the current financial crisis. The 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics successfully avoids jargon in presenting a smart, interesting take on global financial crises in the 1990s.

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

Incredible. Insightful. Inspiring. These are the words I use to describe Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, the pivotal textbook on the growing politics of Asian American women.

Arm the Spirit: A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back

Upon finishing the initial chapters of the memoir Arm the Spirit, I was caught off guard by how different the experiences of Diana Block were from my own. Written from her memories of participating in revolutionary movements and subsequently shifting to life underground, Block’s stories did not reflect the political landscape that I am familiar with today.

Running from the Devil

Jamie Freveletti’s authorial debut, Running from the Devil, begins with the story of Emma Caldridge, a chemist and ultra-marathon runner who boards a plane for Bogota and ends up in a plane crash in the Colombian jungle. She is thrown from the wreckage during the crash, and thus spared from being taken hostage by a group of Colombian guerillas.

Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions

When I finished Statistical Panic I was left mulling over the ideas presented in the book for the next few days. A deeply theoretical exploration of the emotional landscape, Kathleen Woodward frames her book in American culture over the past fifty years, revealing the political, social, and cultural power that emotions have in our lives.

Miss Don't Touch Me

Miss Don't Touch Me is the story of a girl, Blanche, who works with her sister, Agatha, as a live-in maid in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. When Blanche witnesses her sister’s murder, her world is destroyed. People think Agatha committed suicide, and nobody will believe Blanche.

Love and Other Natural Disasters

This is your life, now what? This is the question Eve has to answer when she finds out during Thanksgiving dinner that her husband, Jon, has been having a long distance emotional affair with another woman for the past year. Eve is devastated and demands that Jon move out that night. Jon complies and leaves their house. Eve’s feeling of betrayal and mistrust lead her to start hacking Jon’s email in order to find out more about the other woman, Laney. Eve reads all Jon’s correspondence with Laney, but she is unable to figure why Jon lied to her for a year.

Gold Dust on His Shirt: The True Story of an Immigrant Mining Family

When you think about migrant memoirs of North America, stories of moving north from Latin America often come to mind more than those detailing moves east and west. Flipping around that common assumption, Gold Dust on His Shirt tells the story of Irene Howard’s Swedish-Norwegian immigrant family’s tumultuous life in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. After the death of her first husband in Norway, Howard’s mother Ingeborg immigrated to Canada.

Free From Lies: Discovering Your True Needs

In her latest study, Free From Lies, famed psychologist Alice Miller examines the way child abuse shapes the psyche and the effect it can have on humanity. While the human brain has an incredible ability to normalize traumatic events, Miller argues that abuses suffered in childhood can never truly be repressed. It appears as though humanity is suffering from a collective amnesia regarding the wrongs we suffered in infancy.

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan by Doris Chang offers a compelling history of the recurrent feminist movement in Taiwan’s imperial and post-war eras.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics. Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness.

Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy

It’s absolutely astonishing to realize how much junk people in North America consume only to throw away. Most of it is from China. When I started to read Where Underpants Come From, I picked up various objects in my office—from the mechanical pencil I write with to my iPod—and I discovered that yes, everything had been made in China.

Spell Albuquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student

I found Tennessee Reed’s memoir of her educational and professional life to be inspiring and informative.

On Joanna Russ

Last summer, in an effort to learn more about female writers of speculative fiction (SF), I read Charlotte Spivack’s Merlin’s Daughters. While the majority of the book was a rather boring summary of what the aforementioned "daughters" had written, the introduction posited that all speculative fiction has subversive possibilities. After all, the author is imagining a new world and probably one structured by a new social order, right?
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