Book picks similar to
Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses by Hilary Matfess
africa
non-fiction
thought-provoking
books-about-muslims
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - 2021
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions.Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society that begins with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to tap into humanity’s wealth of knowledge about the wonders of the universe.
Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
Jean M. Twenge - 2006
In this provocative new book, headline-making psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls "Generation Me" -- those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s -- are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.Herself a member of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge uses findings from the largest intergenerational research study ever conducted -- with data from 1.3 million respondents spanning six decades -- to reveal how profoundly different today's young adults are. Here are the often shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior, as well as controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes and dreams, disappointments and challenges of Generation Me.GenMe has created a profound shift in the American character, changing what it means to be an individual in today's society. The collision of this generation's entitled self-focus and today's competitive marketplace will create one of the most daunting challenges of the new century. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, funny, "Generation Me" will give Boomers new insight into their offspring, and help those in their teens, 20s, and 30s finally make sense of themselves and their goals and find their road to happiness.
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
Jessica McDiarmid - 2019
The highway is known as the 'Highway of Tears', and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.Journalist, Jessica McDiarmid, investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims--mothers and fathers, siblings and friends--McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada--now estimated to number up to 4,000--contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing, and murdered, Indigenous women, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.
Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town
Warren St. John - 2009
Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colours playing football in any open space they could find. Among them was Luma Mufleh, a Jordanian woman who founded a youth football team to unify Clarkston's refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees.Outcasts United follows a pivotal season in the life of the Fugees and their charismatic coach. Warren St. John documents the lives of a diverse group of young people as they miraculously coalesce into a band of brothers, while also drawing a fascinating portrait of a fading American town struggling to accommodate its new arrivals. At the centre of the story is fiery Coach Luma, who relentlessly drives her players to success on the football field while holding together their lives—and the lives of their families—in the face of a series of daunting challenges.This fast-paced chronicle of a single season is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community—and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world.
Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being
Harold Napoleon - 1991
Afflicted by epidemics and their consequences from the 1770s until the 1940s, Alaska Natives are still feeling traumatic effects in the form of alcoholism, suicide and violence. The wholeness of a society that maintained health and vigor for thousands of years was broken by the Great Death and has not been repaired by anti-poverty programs, welfare, government-sponsored health and education programs, or prohibition laws. Through bitter experience, Napoleon, a Yupik Eskimo, has acquired clarity in understanding the roots and tenacity of these problems, articulating them clearly and powerfully. But more than this, he offers a message of hope pointing the way toward cultural revitalization that can begin now. The steps in the journey to reclaiming health and well-being depends on communicating the sorrow and loss and embracing a new way of thinking about the problem. While there is much work to be done, this work shows a way that individuals and villages can transform the Great Death into new life.Napoleon’s narrative is followed by commentaries from elders and academics concerned with understanding and overcoming the challenges that Alaska Natives face today.
This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor
Susan Wicklund - 2007
Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy—and how hidden this common experience remains. This is the story of Susan's love for a profession that means listening to women and helping them through one of the most pivotal and controversial events in their lives. Hers is also a calling that means sleeping on planes and commuting between clinics in different states—and that requires her to wear a bulletproof vest and to carry a .38 caliber revolver. This is also the story of the women whom Susan serves, women whose options are increasingly limited.Through these intimate, complicated, and inspiring accounts, Wicklund reveals the truth about the women's clinics that anti-abortion activists portray as little more than slaughterhouses for the unborn. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion America has ever seen, this raw and powerful memoir shows us what is at stake.
A Dying Colonialism
Frantz Fanon - 1959
Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression.
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
Richard N. Haass - 2017
The rules, policies, and institutions that have guided the world since World War II have largely run their course. Respect for sovereignty alone cannot uphold order in an age defined by global challenges from terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons to climate change and cyberspace. Meanwhile, great power rivalry is returning. Weak states pose problems just as confounding as strong ones. The United States remains the world’s strongest country, but American foreign policy has at times made matters worse, both by what the U.S. has done and by what it has failed to do. The Middle East is in chaos, Asia is threatened by China’s rise and a reckless North Korea, and Europe, for decades the world’s most stable region, is now anything but. As Richard Haass explains, the election of Donald Trump and the unexpected vote for “Brexit” signals that many in modern democracies reject important aspects of globalization, including borders open to trade and immigrants.In A World in Disarray, Haass argues for an updated global operating system—call it world order 2.0—that reflects the reality that power is widely distributed and that borders count for less. One critical element of this adjustment will be adopting a new approach to sovereignty, one that embraces its obligations and responsibilities as well as its rights and protections. Haass also details how the U.S. should act towards China and Russia, as well as in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. He suggests, too, what the country should do to address its dysfunctional politics, mounting debt, and the lack of agreement on the nature of its relationship with the world.A World in Disarray is a wise examination, one rich in history, of the current world, along with how we got here and what needs doing. Haass shows that the world cannot have stability or prosperity without the United States, but that the United States cannot be a force for global stability and prosperity without its politicians and citizens reaching a new understanding.
Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
Afsaneh Najmabadi - 2005
Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.
A Gardener in the Wasteland: Jotiba Phule's Fight for Liberty
Srividya Natarajan - 2011
A hundred and forty years hence, Srividya Natarajan and Aparajita Ninan breathe fresh life into Phule’s rather graphic imagination, weaving in the story of Savitribai, Jotiba’s partner in his struggles.In today’s climate of intolerance, here’s a manifesto of resistance.‘Reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Brings smack into the foreground something unequivocally evil’—Hindustan Times
Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women
Rebecca Traister - 2010
A woman won a state presidential primary contest (quite a few of them, actually) for the first time in this country's history. Less than a year later, a vice-presidential candidate concluded her appearance in a national debate and immediately reached for her newborn baby. A few months after that, an African American woman moved into the White House not as an employee but as the First Lady. She is only the third First Lady in American history to have a postgraduate degree, and for most of her marriage, she has out-earned her husband. In Big Girls Don't Cry, Rebecca Traister, a Salon.com columnist whose election coverage garnered much attention, makes sense of this moment in American history, in which women broke barriers and changed the country's narrative in completely unexpected ways: How did the volatile, exhilarating events of the 2008 election fit together? What lessons can be learned from these great political upheavals about women, politics, and the media? In an utterly engaging, razor-sharp narrative interlaced with her first-person account of being a young woman navigating this turbulent and exciting time, Traister explores how—thanks to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, and the history-making work and visibility of Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and others—women began to emerge stronger than ever on the national stage.
Clash!: 8 Cultural Conflicts That Make Us Who We Are
Hazel Rose Markus - 2013
Markus and Conner also demonstrate how clashes between independence and interdependence fuel many of today’s most pressing conflicts, including tensions between East and West, the Global North and Global South, men and women, blacks and whites, conservative and liberal, religious groups, rich and poor, and businesses, governments, and nonprofits. Rather than lamenting our multicultural worlds, Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner reveal how we can leverage our differences to mend the rifts in our workplaces, schools, and relationships, as well as on the global stage.Provocative, witty, and painstakingly researched, Clash! not only explains who we are, it also envisions who we could become.
Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win
Anne Kornblut - 2008
Words like inevitable and phenomenon were in the air and the political and cultural stars seemed to be aligned. Why didn't it happen? What will it take to make it happen soon? In a probing analysis sure to ignite controversy, acclaimed White House correspondent Anne Kornblut argues that the optimists are blind to formidable obstacles that still stand in the way of any woman who aims for America's highest political offices. And she makes clear exactly which strategies and common assumptions will need to change if a woman intends to break through the "highest, hardest glass ceiling" of all. Delving deep inside the Clinton and Palin campaigns, Kornblut reveals: - the strategists' mishandling of their candidates as women by failing to strike the right balance between femininity and toughness - Clinton's weathering of a series of stinging gender-based attacks, until accusations of "pimping out" her daughter, Chelsea, finally brought her to tears - that Barack Obama was celebrated for his "historic"win in Iowa, even though it was not the first time an African American had won a caucus, but few noticed when Clinton became the first woman to win a primary in New Hampshire - that Palin was chosen solely by men, none of whom had experience in running women for office Drawing from exclusive interviews with prominent women in both parties, Kornblut pinpoints where politically ambitious American women have gone wrong and what it will take to put them on track to the ultimate prize: the presidency. Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice asserts: "We crossed the bar on African Americans some time ago. I'm not quite sure we've crossed it on women." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarks on the "suit of armor" women must don to survive the sexism and viciousness of politics. Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano confronts the false rumors that she is a lesbian and reveals what an invigorating "kick in the pants" it is to be in politics. And California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, the former head of eBay, compares politics to business: "It feels to me, thus far, as less of a meritocracy and more of a popularity contest. More of a little bit of an old boys' club." Kornblut identifies the surprising realities of gender politics, such as the harsh treatment female candidates often receive from women voters, the gap between the United States and other countries when it comes to the electability of women, the "mommy penalty" that handicaps women candidates with young children, and the special appeal that women with law enforcement backgrounds have with voters. "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling" reveals that the highly touted new era of gender-equal politics never got as far as was commonly perceived and is now in full retreat. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about politics and the limits for women that persist.
No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times
Dorothy Rabinowitz - 2003
Recalling the hysteria that accompanied the child sex-abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s and 1990s, Rabinowitz's investigative study brings to life such alarming examples of prosecutorial terrors as the case against New Jersey nursery school worker Kelly Michaels, absurdly accused of 280 counts of sexual assault; the as-yet-unfinished story of Gerald Amirault's involvement in the Fells Acres scandal; Patrick Griffin, a respected physician whose life and reputation were destroyed by one false accusation of molestation; and Miami policeman Grant Snowden's sentencing of five consecutive life terms for a crime that, as proved in court eleven years later, he did not commit. By turns a shocking exposé, a much-needed postmortem, and a required-reading assignment for prosecutors and judges alike, No Crueler Tyrannies is ultimately an inspiring book about the courage of ordinary citizens who believe in the American judicial system enough to fight for due process.
Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family
Najla Said - 2013
Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her. The fact that her father was the famous intellectual and outspoken Palestinian advocate Edward Said only made things more complicated. She may have been born a Palestinian Lebanese American, but in Said’s mind she grew up first as a WASP, having been baptized Episcopalian in Boston and attending the wealthy Upper East Side girls’ school Chapin, then as a teenage Jew, essentially denying her true roots, even to herself—until, ultimately, the psychological toll of all this self-hatred began to threaten her health.As she grew older, making increased visits to Palestine and Beirut, Said’s worldview shifted. The attacks on the World Trade Center, and some of the ways in which Americans responded, finally made it impossible for Said to continue to pick and choose her identity, forcing her to see herself and her passions more clearly. Today, she has become an important voice for second-generation Arab Americans nationwide.