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Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.Gendered Islamophobia: My Journey With a Scar(f)
By Monia Mazigh. 2023
This passionate book describes the author's struggles against Islamophobia as it applies to women, especially those wearing hijab, who consistently…
get stereotyped as silent and compliant women dominated by their men.A Bucket of Stars
By Suri Rosen. 2023
A story of two kids trying to save the world they know and heal the families they have.It’s the summer…
of 2003 and thirteen-year-old astronomer Noah Cooper has just moved to Queensport, a small town with a vast amateur sky full of stars. There he meets Tara Dhillon, a lonely girl and aspiring filmmaker. When the two team up to produce an astronomy movie and enter a film contest, they discover a secret plan to turn their rural hamlet into a huge subdivision.Noah and Tara must use their unique skills to identify the culprits who plan on paving over the historic county — and try to save the infinite beauty of the stars. As if that’s not enough to have at stake, Noah needs to win the prize money to buy a new telescope for his unemployed father — an ex-astronomer who’s almost given up on the stars, as well as life on earth.Touching on themes of activism, environmental anxiety and mental health, A Bucket of Stars will have readers cheering for Noah, a boy whose head is in the stars, and Tara, a girl who lives in a world of digital images — and their special bond that just might mend the world around them.Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism (Do You Know My Name? #4)
By Mary Fairhurst Breen. 2023
The activists between these pages have stood up for the queer community, whether on their own behalf or in support…
of people they love. Some made a difference by confronting injustice; others dared to be fully themselves.See It, Dream It, Do It: How 25 people just like you found their dream jobs
By Colleen Nelson, Kathie MacIsaac. 2023
From award-winning author Colleen Nelson, and literacy advocate Kathie MacIsaac, twenty-five profiles present a plethora of jobs, and people, making…
it easier than ever for young people to see their dreams and to live their dreams!Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality
By Lily Geismer. 2022
The 40-year history of how Democrats chose political opportunity over addressing inequality—and how the poor have paid the priceFor decades,…
the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for &“business-friendly&” policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But this incisive political history shows that the current inequality crisis was also enabled by a Democratic Party that catered to the affluent.The result is one of the great missed opportunities in political history: a moment when we had the chance to change the lives of future generations and were too short-sighted to take it.Historian Lily Geismer recounts how the Clinton-era Democratic Party sought to curb poverty through economic growth and individual responsibility rather than asking the rich to make any sacrifices. Fueled by an ethos of &“doing well by doing good,&” microfinance, charter schools, and privately funded housing developments grew trendy. Though politically expedient and sometimes profitable in the short term, these programs fundamentally weakened the safety net for the poor.This piercingly intelligent book shows how bygone policy decisions have left us with skyrocketing income inequality and poverty in America and widened fractures within the Democratic Party that persist to this day.Exit Berlin: How One Woman Saved Her Family from Nazi Germany
By Charlotte R. Bonelli. 2014
Centered around one family&’s preserved personal letters, this is &“an intimate, engaging examination of the plight of German Jewish refugees&”…
(Kirkus Reviews). Just a week after the Kristallnacht terror in 1938, young Luzie Hatch, a German Jew, fled Berlin to resettle in New York. Her rescuer was an American-born cousin and industrialist, Arnold Hatch. Arnold spoke no German, so Luzie quickly became translator, intermediary, and advocate for family left behind. Soon an unending stream of desperate requests from German relatives made their way to Arnold&’s desk. Luzie Hatch faithfully preserved her letters both to and from far-flung relatives during the World War II era as well as copies of letters written on their behalf. This extraordinary collection, now housed at the American Jewish Committee Archives, serves as the framework for Exit Berlin. Charlotte R. Bonelli offers a vantage point rich with historical context, from biographical information about the correspondents to background on U.S. immigration laws, conditions at the Vichy internment camps, refuge in Shanghai, and many other topics, thus transforming the letters into a riveting narrative. Arnold&’s letters also reveal an unfamiliar side of Holocaust history. His are the responses of an &“average&” American Jew, struggling to keep his own business afloat while also assisting dozens of relatives trapped abroad—most of whom he&’d never met and whose situation he could not fully comprehend. This book contributes importantly to historical understanding while also uncovering the dramatic story of one besieged family confronting unimaginable evil. &“Has as much to teach readers about today&’s world, which is filled with war and displacement, as it does about the world of the 1930s.&” —Kirkus Reviews &“For a generation steeped in email, this heartrending collection of letters takes us to a more intimately communicative era―in which Jews, trapped in the nightmare of Hitler&’s persecution, pleaded for help to escape to their cousins in America; and in which the latter tried desperately, generously, to respond.&” —Michael R. Marrus, author of The Holocaust in HistorySummer of Hamn: Hollowpointlessness Aiding Mass Nihilism
By Chuck D. 2023
The tragedy of gun violence is depicted in annotated illustrations that illuminate a society gone hamn; from legendary hip-hop artist…
Chuck D (Public Enemy, Prophets of Rage, etc.) "With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the US has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness . . . A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review IN SUMMER OF HAMN, legendary hip-hop artist Chuck D takes on gun violence with rhythmic, inventive writing and passionately raw art. He has long spoken out against gun violence, including how it intersects with rap and hip-hop culture. Summer of Hamn is the bound journal Chuck D carried with him in the summer of 2022—a summer marked by a particularly high rate of gun death. In these pages, victims are memorialized, politicians are skewered, and vehement pleas to eradicate gun violence are made. Jaw-dropping statistics (40% of all personal guns in the world are owned by US citizens; there are 100 million more guns in the US than there are citizens) intersect with poetic reflections ("Another mall shooting seems normalized in Columbus / Raining outside in Ohio / Raining inside folks panic / Inside hearing shots bust"), all written in Chuck's hand over vibrant, utterly original, neoexpressionist ink and watercolor art. This book is the follow-up to STEWdio the debut trilogy on Chuck D's Enemy Books imprint, in which he invented a new medium—the "naphic grovel"—a bound journal brimming with his observations and reflections of current events in both art and prose. Summer of Hamn is the second release on the imprint.Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion
By Gabrielle Stanley Blair. 2022
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERIn Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair offers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of…
28 brief arguments, Blair deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away from controlling and legislating women&’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men&’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than women), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy. The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility—and burden—of preventing unwanted pregnancies away from women and onto men.Tourism and Poverty Reduction: Principles and impacts in developing countries
By Anna Spenceley and Dorothea Meyer. 2016
Over the past decade, there have been an increasing number of publications that have analysed and critiqued the potential of…
tourism to be a mechanism for poverty reduction in less economically developed countries (LEDCs). This book showcases work by established and emerging researchers that provides new thinking and tests previously made assumptions, providing an essential guide for students, practitioners and academics. This book advances our understanding of the changes and ways forward in the field of sustainable tourism development. Five main themes are illustrated throughout the book: (1) measuring impacts of tourism on poverty; (2) the need to evaluate whether interventions that aim to reduce poverty are effective; (3) how unbalanced power relations and weak governance can undermine efforts; (4) the importance of the private sector’s use of pro-poor business practices; and (5) the value of using multidisciplinary and multi-method research approaches. Furthermore, the book shows that academic research findings can be used practically in destinations, and how practitioners can benefit from sharing their experiences with academic scholars.This book was based on a special issue and various articles from the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.Childhood and the Production of Security
By J. Marshall Beier. 2017
Responding to security scholars’ puzzling dearth of attention to children and childhoods, the contributors to this volume reveal the ways…
in which they not only are already present in security discourses but are actually indispensable to them and to the political projects they make possible. From zones of conflict to everyday life contexts in the (post)industrial Global North, dominant ideas about childhood work to regulate the constitution of political subjects whilst variously enabling and foreclosing a wide range of political possibilities. Whether on the battlefields of Syria, in the halls of the UN, or the conceptual musings of disciplinary Security Studies, claims about or ostensibly on behalf of children are ubiquitous. Recognizing children as engaged political subjects, however, challenges us to bring a sustained critical gaze to the discursive and semiotic deployments of children and childhood in projects not of their making as well as to the ways in which power circulates through and around them. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies on Security.Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation
By Mindie Lazarus-Black. 2007
Exposing the powerful contradictions between empowering rights and legal rites By investigating the harms routinely experienced by the victims and…
survivors of domestic violence, both inside and outside of law, Everyday Harm studies the limits of what domestic violence law can--and cannot--accomplish. Combining detailed ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Mindie Lazarus-Black illustrates the ways persistent cultural norms and ingrained bureaucratic procedures work to unravel laws designed to protect the safety of society’s most vulnerable people. Lazarus-Black’s fieldwork in Trinidad traces a story with global implications about why and when people gain the right to ask the court for protection from violence, and what happens when they pursue those rights in court. Why is itthat, in spite of laws designed to empower subordinated people, so little results from that legislation? What happens in and around courts that makes it so difficult for people to obtain their legally available rights and protections? In the case of domestic violence law, what can such legislation mean for women’s empowerment, gender equity, and protection? How do cultural norms and practices intercept the law?The Politics of Violence, Truth and Reconciliation in the Arab Middle East
By Sune Haugbolle and Anders Hastrup. 2009
In the last five to ten years, pressure for political liberalisation, and the growth of civil society and independent media,…
inside Arab countries have prompted the debate about violent events in the postcolonial period. This book features studies of six Arab countries in which legacies of political violence have been challenged through various initiatives to promote "truth-telling" and transitional justice. The analysis departs from a liberal, teleological understanding of truth and reconciliation as a linear process from trauma through memory to national healing. Instead, the articles highlight how the interplay between state-orchestrated initiatives (such as Truth and Reconciliation committees and ministerial committees); civil society actors (including former political prisoners, investigative journalists and NGOs); and external actors (such as transnational NGOs, state sponsored dialogue initiatives, the UN and the EU) is creating a new political field. The book examines the extent to which this field challenges the Arab nation-state’s monopoly on history and violence, and asks whether public narratives of violence, memory and justice consolidate or challenge political legitimacy of current regimes. This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.Positive: A Memoir
By Paige Rawl, Ali Benjamin. 2014
Paige Rawl was an ordinary girl.Cheerleader, soccer player, honor roll student. One of the good kids at her middle school.…
Then, on an unremarkable day, Paige disclosed the one thing that made her "different": her HIV-positive status.It didn't matter that she was born with the disease or that her illness posed no danger to her classmates.Within hours, the bullying began.They called her PAIDS. Left cruel notes on her locker. Talked in whispers about her and mocked her openly. She turned to school administrators for help. Instead of assisting her, they ignored her urgent pleas . . . and told her to stop the drama.She had never felt more alone.One night, desperate for escape, Paige found herself in front of the medicine cabinet, staring at a bottle of sleeping pills.That could have been the end of her story. Instead, it was only the beginning.Finding comfort in steadfast friends and a community of other kids touched by HIV, Paige discovered the strength inside of her, and she embarked on a mission to change things for the bullied kids who would follow in her footsteps.In this astonishing memoir, Paige immerses the reader in her experience and tells a story that is both deeply personal and completely universal: a story of one girl overcoming relentless bullying by choosing to be Positive.A Place Called Home: A Memoir
By David Ambroz. 2022
PORCHLIGHT BESTSELLER Zibby Owens 2022 Book of the Year A galvanizing, stirring memoir about growing up homeless and in foster care…
and rising to become a leading advocate for child welfare, recognized by President Obama as an American Champion of Change. &“You will fall in love with David Ambroz, his beautifully-told, gut-wrenching story, and his great big heart.&” (Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle) &“It's impossible to read A Place Called Home and not want to redouble your efforts to fight the systems of poverty that have plagued America for far too long. In this book, David shares his deeply personal story and issues a rousing call to make this a more humane and compassionate nation.&”—HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON There are millions of homeless children in America today and in A Place Called Home, award-winning child welfare advocate David Ambroz writes about growing up homeless in New York for eleven years and his subsequent years in foster care, offering a window into what so many kids living in poverty experience every day. When David and his siblings should be in elementary school, they are instead walking the streets seeking shelter while their mother is battling mental illness. They rest in train stations, 24-hour diners, anywhere that&’s warm and dry; they bathe in public restrooms and steal food to quell their hunger. When David is placed in foster care, at first it feels like salvation but soon proves to be just as unsafe. He&’s moved from home to home and, in all but one placement, he&’s abused. His burgeoning homosexuality makes him an easy target for other&’s cruelty. David finds hope and opportunities in libraries, schools, and the occasional kind-hearted adult; he harnesses an inner grit to escape the all-too-familiar outcome for a kid like him. Through hard work and unwavering resolve, he is able to get a scholarship to Vassar College, his first significant step out of poverty. He later graduates from UCLA Law with a vision of using his degree to change the laws that affect children in poverty. Told with lyricism and sparkling with warmth, A Place Called Home depicts childhood poverty and homelessness as it is experienced by so many young people who have been systematically overlooked and unprotected. It&’s at once a gripping personal account of deprivation—how one boy survived it, and ultimately thrived—and a resounding call for readers to move from empathy to action.Feminism Counts: Quantitative Methods and Researching Gender
By Christina Hughes, Rachel Lara Cohen. 2012
This is an important and timely text that provides a unique overview of contemporary quantitative approaches to gender research. The…
contributors are internationally recognised researchers from the UK, USA and Sweden who occupy a range of disciplinary locations, including historical demography, sociology and policy studies. Their research includes explorations of heterosexual and same sex violence, media responses to feminist research, data sources for the study of equalities, approaches for analysing global and local demographic change and intersectional concerns in respect of work and employment.Through detailed, sophisticated and thoughtful considerations of the place of quantification within gender studies, and the place of feminist approaches to quantification, each contributor overturns the stereotype that quantitative research is antithetical to feminism by demonstrating its importance for challenging continuing global inequalities associated with gendered outcomes. An introductory chapter illustrates the significance of geography and discipline in the take-up of methodological preferences.Feminism Counts: Quantitative Methods and Researching Gender makes an important contribution to the ways in which feminists respond to contemporary methodological and interdisciplinary challenges, and is essential reading for all research students in gender studies.This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.National Book Award Finalist: A study of national myths, lore, and identity that &“will interest all those concerned with American…
cultural history&” (American Political Science Review).Winner of the American Historical Association&’s Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in American History In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, historian and cultural critic Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries—including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville—Slotkin traces the full development of this myth. &“Deserves the careful attention of everyone concerned with the history of American culture or literature. &”—Comparative Literature &“Slotkin&’s large aim is to understand what kind of national myths emerged from the American frontier experience. . . . [He] discusses at length the newcomers&’ search for an understanding of their first years in the New World [and] emphasizes the myths that arose from the experiences of whites with Indians and with the land.&” —Western American LiteratureNational Book Award Finalist: The &“impressive&” conclusion to the &“magisterial trilogy on the mythology of violence in American history&” (Film…
Quarterly). &“The myth of the Western frontier—which assumes that whites&’ conquest of Native Americans and the taming of the wilderness were preordained means to a progressive, civilized society—is embedded in our national psyche. U.S. troops called Vietnam &‘Indian country.&’ President John Kennedy invoked &‘New Frontier&’ symbolism to seek support for counterinsurgency abroad. In an absorbing, valuable, scholarly study, [the author] traces the pervasiveness of frontier mythology in American consciousness from 1890. . . . Dime novels and detective stories adapted the myth to portray gallant heroes repressing strikers, immigrants and dissidents. Completing a trilogy begun with Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment, Slotkin unmasks frontier mythmaking in novels and Hollywood movies. The myth&’s emphasis on use of force over social solutions has had a destructive impact, he shows.&” —Publishers Weekly &“Stirring . . . Breaks new ground in its careful explication of the continuing dynamic between politics and myth, myth and popular culture.&” —The New York Times &“A subtle and wide-ranging examination how America&’s fascination with the frontier has affected its culture and politics. . . . Intellectual history at its most stimulating—teeming with insights into American violence, politics, class, and race.&” —Kirkus ReviewsWhat We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms
By Jonathan M. Metzl. 2024
A searing reflection on the broken promise of safety in America. When a naked, mentally ill white man with an…
AR-15 killed four young adults of color at a Waffle House, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl once again advocated for commonsense gun reform. But as he peeled back evidence surrounding the racially charged mass shooting, a shocking question emerged: Did the public health approach he had championed for years have it all wrong? Long at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. As he came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free. In What We’ve Become, Metzl reckons both with the long history of distrust of public health and the larger forces—social, ideological, historical, racial, and political—that allow mass shootings to occur on a near daily basis in America. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography. This brilliant, piercing analysis points to mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We’ve Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance forging, racial reckoning, and political power brokering we must take to put things right.