Elevate Difference

Books

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

Many people shy away from trying to understand economics. They assume that because they don’t know much about tax or trade policies, or because they don’t understand what a derivative on Wall Street is and does, that economics is too complicated, and they leave the fate of the economy in the hands of the “experts”. The trouble with this is that the experts often have a vested interest in keeping everyone else in the dark in order to make a profit. Enter Robert Reich.

Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women

Street harassment is rampant in all parts of the world—from New York City to Tokyo to Cairo—yet it is still accepted globally. This largely ignored problem is thoroughly discussed and analyzed in Holly Kearl’s book entitled, Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women. Defined by Kearl in the first chapter as “unwanted attention” in public places, street harassment includes and is not limited to “physically harmless leers, whistles, honks, kissing noises, and nonsexually explicit evaluative comments,” but also extends to “more insulting and threatening behavior like vulgar gestures, sexually charged comments, flashing, and stalking, to illegal actions like public masturbation, sexual touching, assault, and rape.” Many (if not most) women experience it; very few men know about it.

Death Echo

Death Echo is categorized as a suspense novel. On that score, the book delivers, but not for the reason that the author intended: I was in suspense for the entire book trying to figure out what was going on. Emma Cross, of the elite security consulting firm St. Kilda's, is assigned to find out if a newly commissioned yacht is the same yacht that was supposedly washed overboard on its way to being delivered.

Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America

Alan Khazei is a heckuva guy. In 1988, he co-founded City Year, a privately funded domestic service organization that lead directly to the establishment of AmeriCorps. When AmeriCorps was threatened out of existence by budget cuts in 2003, Khazei spearheaded the drive to save it. Today he runs Be the Change, Inc., a group that “creates national public awareness campaigns to build momentum for citizen service as a practical solution to problems facing our communities and our country.” A better-intentioned guy would be hard to find. Alan Khazei is also a politician.

This Is Where We Live

This Is Where We Live is the second novel of Janelle Brown. It is the tale of a struggling filmmaker, Claudia, and her marriage to Jeremy Munger, a struggling musician. A couple in their thirties who are also new homeowners, the Mungers deal with the financial burden of their home and the shortcomings of their luck in the ways of talent in different ways. While Brown has a funny and insightful writing style, the novel ultimately falls flat.

Ripe from Around Here

I'm an avid vegan cookbook collector, and Ripe From Around Here is more than a vegan cookbook. jae steele, a holistic nutritionist from Toronto, offers a neat little package of sustainability, mindfulness, and the politics of food in addition to vegan gourmet recipes in the end.

Elizabeth's Women: Friends, Rivals, and Foes who Shaped the Virgin Queen

Tracy Borman’s book, Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen, is an account of the women in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and her relationship with them. As an avid reader of historical accounts of royals, I found this particular book to be notable for a number of reasons. It was well written, honest, and reflected Borman’s passion for the life of Queen Elizabeth I.

Guardian Spirit

Every good young adult book needs a strong adolescent female heroine, and Guardian Spirit has one in Sadie Madison. Despite the challenges she has faced in her twelve short years, or perhaps because of them, Sadie maintains a resilient, practical core that propels her through her mother’s decision to run away from an abusive husband with Sadie and her younger brother.

Queen of the Night

There is only one word to describe J.A. Jance’s Queen of the Night: lazy. Reading it makes you feel like you’ve turned on a bad soap opera. Plot lines pick up in the middle, then disappear. Certain twists appear out of nowhere, and connect to nothing else. Some characters come in with no introduction, relationships are assumed between others.

Patrick's Wish

Patrick's Wish is a true story told from the perspective of a young girl whose brother had a serious illness. It is evident from page one that there was some serious hero worship going on when it came to her older brother, Patrick. The book itself has an almost scrapbook feel to it, with alternating pages of text and photographs from Patrick and Lyanne’s childhood, and it details Lyanne’s eventual discovery that her brother’s illness is terminal.

Going Away Shoes

The protagonists of Jill McCorkle’s exciting collection of stories, Going Away Shoes, are middle-aged heterosexuals deep in the doldrums of life’s disappointments. Whether because of a stalled career, a divorce, a death, or simply the exhaustion born of juggling family, work and social obligations, these are women who’ve been battered by everyday tragedies and everyday pressures.

Ripe From Around Here

When jae steele’s Ripe From Around Here arrived, it joined a pile of vegan library books on my kitchen table. I needed inspiration and fresh ideas, and hoped one of the books would help. steele’s book was the star. These are the recipes that will become everyday favorites, and the ones that omnivores will devour, blissfully unaware that no animal products are present.

Cuba On My Mind

Cuba, in my mind: cigars, Fidel Castro’s beard, Elian Gonzalez, and a very murky high school level comprehension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Let’s get more specific and, arguably, more self-incriminating. What comes to mind when I think of pre-Castro Cuba? The Godfather: Part II. That lavish New Year’s Eve party where Michael discovers Fredo’s betrayal. Oh yes, and the actual history: Fulgencio Batista stepping down (read: fleeing), leaving Cuba to Castro.

The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti

Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell's collection of short stories, The Company of Heaven, is an unkind narrative of Haiti and Haitians. It is unkind in the way one can be unkind when recalling a sibling’s awkward puberty or seeing for the first time, the humiliation of a parent by a stranger in a public place. She is unkind to her Haitians and yet she remains a family member, intimately invested and loyal. It is difficult to like even one of her characters, however, it is even more difficult to look away from them.

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story

What is it about the form of the life story—the autobiography—that makes it so seductive and so deeply discomfiting at the same time? I think it’s how the boundaries between private and public, someone else’s life and your own, blur in your reading. The relationship you forge is rich and colorful and insightful, but it’s also dark and violent and difficult to come to terms with.

A Season of Seduction

When critiquing a work, being meh is the worst feeling. If a book or a movie is bad, there is plenty to say. The same thing applies when it is wonderful. But when it is neither, it gets hard. What do you say? It was adequately plotted? The characters were pleasant? A Season of Seduction by Jennifer Haymore falls into this category. Some parts of the novel were good, others bad, but overall, it just was. A romance novel set in 1827, the story follows Lady Rebecca Fisk, a young widow with a dark history, as she falls in and out of love with Jack Fulton, sailor rogue extraordinaire who also has a dark history. The novel opens with the two of them getting caught in bed together by her family, which is used to set up an entirely plausible plot. Events happen around Christmas, thus the name.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modern Bestiary

I met bestselling author David Sedaris in 2008 at a Barnes and Noble book-signing event for When You Are Engulfed In Flames. While he seemed more than a little uncomfortable with the kind of feigned intimacy such an event requires, he was still charming, professional, and idiosyncratic throughout our brief encounter. He asked me if I liked turtles, as he set about doodling a smiling cartoon turtle on the title page.

Touch

Touch is a slim volume wherein each carefully-chosen word comes together to create cinematic imagery. Written by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, Touch centers on the youngest of nine sisters, and it is divided into five sections: colors, silence, movement, language, and finally, only a page long, the wall.

The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures

This is a book for the post post-modernist thinker. Written by professor of political science, Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures seeks to alleviate the theorist's conundrum with the material consequences in the events of natural disaster and destruction. Many theorists today are curiously silent on tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and earthquakes and Hekman sees this as a problem of post-modern thinking.

Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

The women-run organization The Society for Maternal Charity survived more than a hundred years of wars, revolutions, and government changes. Initially the group began because of the number of children being abandoned due to poverty. Not only were these foundlings expensive for the state, but they also had a very high mortality rate. Women’s societies were viewed as more ideal than orphanages and seen as an extension of the women’s domestic sphere.

Beyond Vengeance, Beyond Duality: A Call for a Compassionate Revolution

A former trial lawyer, Sylvia Clute became disheartened with the prevailing justice system and began her search for new approaches to justice. In her compelling book, Beyond Vengeance, Beyond Duality, she calls for a compassionate revolution that is based on the “Oneness” or unity of life.

Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant

On the surface, Susan Supernaw’s memoir Muscogee Daughter: My Sojourn to the Miss America Pageant is a story about an unlikely Miss Oklahoma winner and her trip to the 1971 Miss America pageant. The true story, however, is Supernaw’s struggle to escape a childhood marred by extreme poverty and violence and earn the Native American name revealed to her during a near death experience.

The Rey Chow Reader

Not many theorists would re-imagine Jane Eyre as a Maoist. However, postcolonial thinker Rey Chow does and with great aplomb. Furthermore, it's not in the context of English literature in which Chow invokes the fictional heroine, but rather the issue of Orientalism in today's academia. According to Chow, the Maoist Jane Eyre is a romantic and a self-styled victim that is embodied in the non-native scholar of East Asian studies who bemoans the loss of cultural “authenticity” in an increasingly globalised world.

Revenge

Revenge sketches the transformation of Jhumur, an educated, ambitious Bengali lady who after marriage transforms into a meek, obedient wife. Taslima Nasrin has portrayes Jhumur as a strong yet submissive woman who married Haroon for love and is bewildered to see the change in her husband’s attitude after the wedding. The book keeps us pondering on the ideas of right and righteous acts.

Remedies

“When you [lack] words to make others understand your truths, you [stand] apart from the jabbering masses. You alone [possess] proof of your unique and involuted humanness, and through that, contact with something divine.” Our ability to experience pain is what makes us human, but it is our inability to describe pain that brings us close to god. In moments of great crisis, religious rituals provide us with the right words to say.

Juliet: A Novel

We all know Shakespeare's story of two star crossed lovers; it’s heartbreakingly romantic and tragic at the same time. It’s also a storyline that has lasted since its debut and has inspired many a story since. One of these stories—Juliet—is the authorial debut of Anne Fortier. We've all read, one way or another, some twist of the Bard’s original play. And if you’re a writer you may have written one yourself (I know I have).

Burning of the Three Fires

Burning of the Three Fires marks the third collection of poems from Jeanne Marie Beaumont. Beaumont, who won a National Poetry Series award for her first book, experiments with form and examines the female condition in her latest collection. The result is a vibrant mix of poems that keep readers turning the pages and analyzing the words before them. “Girl on a Scale,” though not atypical in form, vividly depicts an eating disorder.

Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity

In its very fragmentariness, Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity serves as an alternative to the traditional scholarly textbook.

Contesting the Archives: Finding Women in the Sources

The collection of essays that encompass Contesting the Archives: Finding Women in the Sources will resonate well with those scholars who have endeavored to conduct research on women in a historical, cultural and/or economic context, for these scholars are well aware of the dearth of complete and detailed historical records on their subjects.

Clamor

Elyse Fenton’s first book of poems, Clamor, features some of the finest contemporary poetry on war. She captures both the battlefield and the homefront with an unwavering realism. Her imagery is fresh and her language rich. Fenton opens her book with a definition of the word “clamor” which is quite striking.
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