Kari O’Driscoll

Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960s to Now

mandy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Signs of Change is both a coffee table book and a full-color history lesson. For those who prefer an alternative to a boring textbook, this book is the ticket. In September of 2008, Exit Art began a traveling art exhibit to showcase the works of artists whose materials reflect cultural and social uprisings around the world, including posters, photographs, and graffiti. The pages are full-color and let the art take center stage, but historical context is provided in a way that is educational without being stifling.

The book itself is divided into different movements, ranging from struggles for political independence to freedom from persecution and bias to women’s rights. Like the social movements themselves, the art is truly international, representing places as diverse as Eastern Europe, South Africa, Latin America, and the United States.

Without taking sides or making moral judgments, Signs of Change effectively explores each of these critical uprisings through the art that symbolizes them. The artists are as diverse as the issues and the book comes across as a comprehensive look at the people who were involved in these social movements as well as the conflicts themselves.

If you were unable to attend any of the art shows where these materials were showcased, all you need to do in order to be awed by the talent and passion of the artists is to pick up this book. And if you want to re-live your own activist days without leaving the comfort of your couch, Signs of Change is the art book for you.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, March 7th 2011

A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

mandy — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 18:00:00 +0000

By Stephanie Coontz

Basic Books

Stephanie Coontz has taken on a project of mythical proportions with her latest work, A Strange Stirring, an examination of the impact Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had on American society and culture in the 1960s. A Strange Stirring looks at both the book’s message to women during this stifling time and investigates the life of Friedan herself, giving the author credit for her truly remarkable work while laying bare some of the controversies surrounding the groundbreaking work.

Coontz has put together a comprehensive picture of what life was like for women in America during the 1950s and '60s. Aside from reading Friedan's book, her research includes books and articles from the same time period to investigate the sociology of American society. She also interviewed women with regard to their experience of Friedan’s book. This approach fills in the details with political, legal, social, cultural, and emotional issues to create an intricate view. Anyone born in the 1970s or later will find themselves immersed in the Mad Men-like world of middle class, suburban housewives.

In an era when women’s lives were predetermined, Friedan’s voice was one of hope and redemption. Women who had been marginalized, demonized, and used to prop up their husbands and children (but only if they did it ‘right') discovered they were not alone in their frustration and despair. Coontz gives credit where it is due, while also making sure to remind the reader that Friedan was not singlehandedly responsible for the birth of the women’s liberation movement.

A Strange Stirring is thoughtful and diligent in its research. Educational and incredibly illustrative of this time period in American history, I can’t imagine a better study of this pivotal work, and truly appreciate its honesty, clarity, and well-rounded approach.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, February 20th 2011

Adult Child of Hippies

andrea — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Willow Yamauchi

Insomniac Press

The cover of Adult Child of Hippies is priceless. For anyone who started out life in the 1960s or 1970s, a version of this photograph of a mostly-naked, preadolescent girl sporting a flower in her mouth probably exists in the family album.

Willow Yamauchi is banking on the fact that the rest of the book will resonate with readers just as strongly. A funny, inspired work in the vein of Jeff Foxworthy’s You Might be a Redneck…, Yamauchi’s humor will help you come to terms with whether or not you were raised by wolves... er, hippies. Each page contains a simple phrase such as “You breast-fed until grade school.” The facing page has a vintage photograph of a real-life flower-child to bring back memories.

There are 144 statements for the reader to identify with, become horrified by, or both. There is extra credit available. For example, you get one point for noting that you practiced yoga daily as a child, but you get a bonus point if your family did it while naked. At the end of the book is a breakdown of scores and the author’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of just how far you’ve distanced yourself from your hippie roots.

I found myself laughing out loud many times as I made my way through the book and it will definitely occupy a place on my bookshelf that is easy to find so that when I have other “flower children” over for dinner we can thumb through it and relive our childhoods. Even if you don’t think you were a child of hippies, Willow Yamauchi’s book might give you a reason to treat the rest of us with a little more compassion in light of what we had to endure growing up during the Woodstock Era.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, February 13th 2011

Self-Liberation: Through Seeing with Naked Awareness

mandy — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By John Myrdhin Reynolds, Guru Padmasambhava

Snow Lion Publications

Self-Liberation is a new translation of a Buddhist text said to have been hidden for generations by its creator, Guru Padmasambhava, in order to ensure that it was not uncovered until such time as Tibetans were mentally prepared for it. This is one of many such texts, but is revered to be the epitome of all Buddhist teachings by many scholars.

The book itself begins with a foreword that establishes the historical context for the teachings as well as explaining the difficulty in translation. John Myrdhin Reynolds is a particularly appropriate translator of this material since he is a Buddhist scholar as well as someone who is able to read Tibetan. After the translator’s introduction, the translation itself is written, followed by an outline of the text, the translator’s comments on the meaning of the text, and several appendices. The original Tibetan text is included as well.

The material is very academic and philosophical in nature, although if the reader is knowledgeable of Buddhist teachings, much of it will be familiar. The ultimate meaning of the term self-liberation is to free one’s self from identifying with his or her own thoughts and to realize that what we have come to know as reality is simply a construct of our mind itself. To simply contemplate the world around you, the author writes, is the act of being purely aware and transcending “mind.”

Throughout, the text repeats its lessons in the format of explaining a principle (View), how to think about the principle (Meditation), how to act on the principle (Conduct), and what one can expect to come of this (Fruit). The ideas are laid out in logical arguments and continually reinforce the importance of continued practice of contemplation of these notions. The author urges the reader not to confuse the nature of the mind with what the mind does: “Meditation involves the activities of the mind and the erecting of mental constructions, but is itself limited by the mind.”

Overall, Self-Liberation is an accessible text that will provide much food for thought to anyone who is interested in and familiar with Buddhist teachings. It is not, however, light reading.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, January 18th 2011

Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists

mandy — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Vanessa Martir, Nancy Lublin, Julia Steers

Workman Publishing Company

Got kids? Do they have time and energy? Do they care about something? Anything? Then get them Do Something!: A Handbook for Young Activists. Buy it, give it to them, sit back, and feel good about having made a difference in the world. Or at least planting the seed.

Do Something! is a very smart book. Lublin begins by helping kids identify what it is they actually care about by having them take a series of quizzes in the first chapter. As long as your kids can read and count, they can make their way through the book entirely on their own. My eight year old daughter and her ten year old sister actually fought over the book, finally settling their dispute by assigning different colors of ink to determine whose answers were where.

Once your child has identified the area or areas they are most likely to be active in, they are given ways to figure out exactly how big the issues are in their own community, what specific kinds of issues there are, and how best to tackle them. Knowing her audience well, Lublin does this by asking the reader to draw brain maps and take surveys and play games throughout the book. She supplements with ideas of her own and examples of other kids who have worked on some of these very same problems. The book reads more like a journal than anything else, and kids will have fun completing the tasks as they come up with their own strategies to implement.

The chapters walk the reader through identifying their hot-button issues, researching the details, crafting a plan, implementing it, and assessing their results. The book can be used over and over again as a way to organize fundraisers or raise awareness of particular problems ranging from bullying to animal rights to disaster response. Lublin empowers kids to make a difference without being prescriptive. The genius of Do Something! is that it validates each child’s personal feelings about what is important and breaks down the steps of acting on those feelings to make activism of any kind perfectly accessible.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, January 14th 2011

Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

farhana — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Claire Dederer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In Poser, Claire Dederer takes on two of the most en vogue trends for young women in the early twenty-first century: yoga and attachment parenting. After a liberated childhood, having been raised in Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s by parents who embraced many of the hippie ideals of the 1960s, Dederer took those lessons of freedom to heart. She, like many others in her generation, went to college but delayed getting a 9-5 job, marriage, and childrearing into her third decade.

Having settled down, she quickly found herself closer to the 1950s, with a husband who was the sole breadwinner except for the emphasis on organic food and co-sleeping and public breastfeeding. Thanks to a back problem and subtle social pressure from her fellow Supermoms, Claire decided to try yoga.

The book is cleverly divided into chapters based on yoga poses that the author was mastering. Throughout her struggle with balance and strength and patience in the yoga studio, the reader follows Dederer as these trials and successes translate into the rest of her life. Without sounding trite or cliché, she manages to draw the reader in to the lessons she is learning about being present in her life in every moment without worrying about perfection—admittedly a difficult concept for someone who grew up being told over and over again that she could, and should, be anything she wanted.

The cast of characters includes two children, Claire’s overworked and underpaid husband, and an assortment of immediate family members who are never more than a stone’s throw away. Each of these relationships shifts ever so slightly as the author becomes more comfortable with her own discomfort, both in various yoga studios and in her everyday life.

Many mothers will immediately identify with her visceral need to measure up to the other mothers in her circle and be perfect and her message comes across in a refreshingly humorous but not self-deprecating way. Whether or not you engage in a yoga practice, there are lessons to be learned from this book.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, December 7th 2010

How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister’s Reawakening After 30 Years of Schizophrenia

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Margaret Hawkins

Conari Press

“There is a truism in the mental health community that says that troubled families focus on the sickest member, even welcoming the sickness, to avoid dealing with other problems,” writes Margaret Hawkins on page 77. By this time, I had been fully introduced to her family and was struck by the truth of this statement.

Margy’s family story began as so many others did in the mid-twentieth century. Dad is a professional, Mom stays home with the children, three children live in a safe suburb, walk to school, argue with each other, and clamor for more freedom. From the outside, perhaps the most boundary-stretching part of their lives was the fact that the age gap between Margy and her older siblings was so large. Barb, the oldest, was eleven, and Tom was eight when she was born, so by the time Margaret was old enough to form any lasting impression of her sister, Barb was graduating from high school. It was during this time that Barb began slowly slipping into schizophrenia.

There were so many strikes against Barb at this point that it seems almost understandable that she fell through the cracks. She was leaving home to live on her own at college, her parents were suspicious of doctors, and mental illness was severely stigmatized in the 1950s and early 1960s. Somehow, Barb managed to graduate college, get married, and move to the Middle East with her husband for two years before her disability became unavoidable.

The story really gets going upon Barb’s return from Iraq when she moves back in with her parents and succumbs to the voices in her head. Her parents make very little attempt to get help for their eldest daughter, instead accommodating her need for isolation and ensuring that she never has to leave the house. This goes on until both parents are dead, nearly thirty years later.

Margy instantly springs into action, proving herself uncannily able to dig up resources to help Barb in the form of home visits from social workers and psychiatrists. She patiently but tenaciously continues to push her sister’s boundaries and is rewarded with an amazing realization that there is more of Barb inside than anyone ever realized.

This story is a testament to the power of love and persistence, patience, and compassion, and will leave you wondering if you just might be selling someone you know a little short because it makes life a little simpler.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, December 2nd 2010

Lily's Odyssey

kristin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Carol Smallwood

All Things That Matter Press

This book is such an incredibly intimate look inside one woman’s life that I was almost ashamed of myself for reading it. The author’s voice is so true in its halting, neurotic narration that it was difficult to remember that this is a work of fiction.

We first meet Lily when one of her abusers dies and the reader is gently led through her mind’s wanderings as she tries to make sense of her role as a victim of incest. From the outside, Lily could be seen as any other woman raised in the Catholic Midwest during the baby boom generation. She managed to make her way to college, get married and divorced, and find a way to support her children largely on her own.

Lily’s Odyssey is not concerned with outward appearances, however. This story is about a woman’s journey to recall childhood abuse and come to terms with the way it has changed her life. Lily not only struggles to remember the abuse itself, but how to share that information with others, if at all. As a middle-aged woman, she has managed to find an awkward but polite existence with her extended family and worries that cracking open the past in order to be true to herself may destroy these relationships forever.

The dilemmas and internal monologue ring true as Lily takes the reader into her past and her nightmares. The story is a painful one, if only because the effects of the abuse on her life are so clear in so many ways. Lily’s view of herself and the world around her has been clouded by her mind’s attempts to reconcile her family’s inability to protect her from her abusers and the tangle of emotions and fears and rational thought is a difficult one to unravel.

It is said that one in four women suffers some kind of sexual abuse in her lifetime. With those statistics, it is not unreasonable to think that there is something in this book for everyone. If not victims ourselves, we all certainly know someone who has struggled with thoughts and feelings much like Lily’s and the author’s tender, accurate portrayal of the victim’s thoughts and emotions is a powerful way to increase our empathy.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, September 19th 2010

Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship

kristin — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Cathie Beck

Voice Trade Publishing

My daughter has a t-shirt that reads “Friends are Forever, Boys are…Whatever”. It always gets a laugh, especially from her female teachers. And while most of us know that friends are not always forever, we do realize the importance of girlfriends. Every girl needs a girlfriend. That one person we can go to with our secrets and our neuroses who will commiserate when we find that enormous zit emerging or the first hair on our chin.

Cheap Cabernet reminds us that there are different girlfriends for different stages of our lives as well. Maybe that one go-to friend in high school isn’t the same one you run to with questions about parenting when you find yourself alone and wondering if your child is going to be a serial killer. Cathie Beck’s story recounts the years of friendship with an unlikely best friend when she finds herself an empty nester. She seems truly surprised to have found this irreverent wild woman with whom to share adventures, but considering that she herself started the ball rolling by putting an ad in the personals seeking “Women on the Way” (WOW) when she was really just casting about for some companionship, maybe her audacity was simply rewarded with this woman in a very fitting way.

Cathie was a very young single mother, with two kids by the age of twenty, who worked hard to get by and these years after her kids have gained independence are truly hers. The unlikely scenarios in which she finds herself seem to be a fair payoff for the years of struggle. Like many of us, Cathie finds herself inspired to do things she would not have dreamed of otherwise thanks to her new found friend. The book is a testament to the power of friendships between women, complete with ups and downs, fights and dressing room hilarity.

It is clear from chapter one, however, where this friendship will end up and, if I have a complaint about the book itself, that would be it. In every single chapter, there is some foreshadowing of the eventual outcome, to the point where I could be heard muttering to myself, “Okay, I get it. Message received.” Overall, however, Cheap Cabernet was a book that reminded me to cultivate my friendships with the lovely women in my life and gave me hope for those days when my daughters aren’t nearly so cavalier about boys and I’m stuck at home alone on a Saturday night. Maybe I’ll pop open a bottle of wine and call a friend who will come make me laugh.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, September 17th 2010

The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Holly Robinson

Three Rivers Press

Holly Robinson begins this book by saying that, essentially, this is a story she has never told. That this is a story she didn’t want to talk about. I am so glad she did.

I am not much for holding back information about my own life and it is completely unfathomable to me how anyone could manage to grow up with a father who raised, became an expert on, and built an empire out of gerbils. I suppose if one was squeamish about having others think you were quirky or odd, you might hesitate, but the story of Robinson’s childhood growing up with a retired Navy captain-turned gerbil farmer is absolutely delightful in its implausibility. I, for one, would not only share the story, but wear it like a badge of honor. I hope she does now that the word is out!

Robinson’s writing is conversational and comfortable. It was like listening to an old friend roll her eyes as she recalled the things her ignorant, dorky parents used to do. We all had embarrassing parents growing up, and it is simply lovely to read about someone whose family was undoubtedly weirder than your own. For anyone who still has secrets locked away in her closet, frightened that her friends or her children or her children’s friends might someday discover, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter is a huge sigh of relief.

Robinson, while no doubt mortified by her father’s obsession with gerbils, was also mystified by her mother’s tacit refusal to have anything to do with them. She was raised by two individuals who, for all their weaknesses, modeled the notion of following your dreams for their children. Those dreams didn’t necessarily coincide or even complement each other, but Robinson may have benefited heartily from her mother’s example that a wife need not blindly follow her husband’s ambitions, military leader or no.

This story is a lighthearted, entertaining read and Robinson does a lovely job of reminding us that there is no such thing as a “normal” childhood.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, August 19th 2010

Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Edited by Nina Simons, Anneke Campbell

Park Street Press

How could the title of this book not hook you? Power. Women. Heart. So, maybe I was biased from the beginning. Honestly, I was hoping that the book would be “all that.” It was.

By page fifteen, not having gotten past the editor’s introduction, I was pulsing with energy. I was ready to get my lazy butt up off the couch and pitch in. I was jonesing for my old “activist” days when I used to join in pro-choice marches and volunteer with the NW AIDS Foundation handing out condoms on the streets of Seattle.

Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart is a collection of essays that were originally presented as lectures to attendees of the annual Bioneers conferences. Nina Simons, the editor and a co-founder of Bioneers, describes it as “a nonprofit educational organization that highlights breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet.” These essays cover a vast range of topics from truly knowing one’s self to finding your inner leader to mentoring, partnering, and imagining innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems as women see them. Some of the authors are household names such as Alice Walker and Julia Butterfly Hill, and others are simply women who are spending their energies learning from and teaching others to live authentically and purposefully. They will undoubtedly be household names in their own right soon.

Each and every essay contained in Moonrise is inspiring, touching, and revitalizing to the reader. Not all of the authors are women, but each and every one of them celebrates the unique gifts that women bring to the world in the form of their vision and perspective as caring, compassionate individuals who have found ways to rise above feelings of powerlessness and living in the minority to honor their communities, societies, and, indeed, the entire planet.

There are humorous tales of women fumbling their way through, led only by their instincts and their resolve to make a difference, painful stories of loss, and everything in between. This book truly offers something for everyone and I, for one, have decided to take the bait. If there are this many strong female voices out there clamoring for a change in the way we approach our collective challenges, it’s the least I can do to join in the march.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, August 12th 2010

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 10th 2010

Female Nomad and Friends: Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World

admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:01:00 +0000

By Rita Golden Gelman

Three Rivers Press

I love reading essay collections. For a voracious reader without much free time, the ability to pick up a book, read a few self-contained pages that pack a punch, and go on to the next task is so rewarding. And unlike reading blog posts, I don’t feel the need to comment or otherwise let the author know that I was there.

Female Nomad and Friends is an absolute treat for women who love to travel and connect with new people. Even for those who simply dream about it, but don’t have the means or the fearlessness to travel to exotic places, this book offers funny stories, unbelievable adventures, and... recipes.

Rita Golden Gelman received such tremendous feedback from her book of travel stories, Tales of a Female Nomad, that she decided to collect some of her favorite fan responses and publish them. Another friend suggested she add recipes and, voila, the book was born.

The essays are organized into different themes: Connecting, Language, Food, Passion, etc. and give the reader a colorful array of experiences that span the globe. The women who contributed stories to the book had predictably unpredictable mishaps, some titillating moments, a few frightening culinary experiences, and ultimately learned some universal truths about people and themselves along the way. In the past few decades, the world has gotten smaller and it is easy to take for granted how easily we can glean facts about life halfway across the world. Thanks to this book, we are reminded that there is just no substitute for face-to-face contact. Reading about personal interactions between people who don’t share languages or cultural norms but who nonetheless show kindness and respect for each other is both heartwarming and hilarious.

I must admit I’ve dog-eared a few recipes to go back and try once I get some free time in the kitchen. There is just something special about re-creating something you first experienced abroad, especially if it is a time honored tradition in someone else’s kitchen. Many of my favorite discussions have occurred in the kitchen, hanging out with a group of women, working away, everyone doing their part to create something magical and special for their families and friends. The travel stories and recipes go hand-in-hand as they create a wonderful tapestry of travel images for the reader.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 9th 2010