Book picks similar to
Staring: How We Look by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson


disability
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Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 1987
    Writing in a lyrical mixture of Spanish and English that is her unique heritage, she meditates on the condition of Chicanos in Anglo culture, women in Hispanic culture, and lesbians in the straight world. Her essays and poems range over broad territory, moving from the plight of undocumented migrant workers to memories of her grandmother, from Aztec religion to the agony of writing. Anzaldua is a rebellious and willful talent who recognizes that life on the border, "life in the shadows," is vital territory for both literature and civilization. Venting her anger on all oppressors of people who are culturally or sexually different, the author has produced a powerful document that belongs in all collections with emphasis on Hispanic American or feminist issues.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America


Kathryn J. Edin - 2015
    Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has procured rich — and truthful — interviews. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. More than a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler


Ben Urwand - 2013
    Ben Urwand reveals this bargain for the first time--a "collaboration" "(Zusammenarbeit)" that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood icons such as Louis B. Mayer.At the center of Urwand's story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies and recognized their power to shape public opinion. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of "All Quiet on the Western Front," which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions. Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios--many of which were headed by Jews--began dealing with his representatives directly.Urwand shows that the arrangement remained in place through the 1930s, as Hollywood studios met regularly with the German consul in Los Angeles and changed or canceled movies according to his wishes. Paramount and Fox invested profits made from the German market in German newsreels, while MGM financed the production of German armaments. Painstakingly marshaling previously unexamined archival evidence, "The Collaboration" raises the curtain on a hidden episode in Hollywood--and American--history.

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 2003
    This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights.Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit


Suzanne E. Smith - 2000
    Through it all, Motown provided the beat. This book tells the story of Motown--as both musical style and entrepreneurial phenomenon--and of its intrinsic relationship to the politics and culture of Motor Town, USA.As Suzanne Smith traces the evolution of Motown from a small record company firmly rooted in Detroit's black community to an international music industry giant, she gives us a clear look at cultural politics at the grassroots level. Here we see Motown's music not as the mere soundtrack for its historical moment but as an active agent in the politics of the time. In this story, Motown Records had a distinct role to play in the city's black community as that community articulated and promoted its own social, cultural, and political agendas. Smith shows how these local agendas, which reflected the unique concerns of African Americans living in the urban North, both responded to and reconfigured the national civil rights campaign.Against a background of events on the national scene--featuring Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, and Malcolm X--Dancing in the Street presents a vivid picture of the civil rights movement in Detroit, with Motown at its heart. This is a lively and vital history. It's peopled with a host of major and minor figures in black politics, culture, and the arts, and full of the passions of a momentous era. It offers a critical new perspective on the role of popular culture in the process of political change.

Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls


Rachel Simmons - 2002
    With this book Rachel Simmons elevated the nation's consciousness and has shown millions of girls, parents, counselors, and teachers how to deal with this devastating problem. Poised to reach a wider audience in paperback, including the teenagers who are its subject, Odd Girl Out puts the spotlight on this issue, using real-life examples from both the perspective of the victim and of the bully.

The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol


Carl Schmitt - 1938
    First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”—Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”—Telos

Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England


Elizabeth Reis - 1997
    She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.

The Savage Mind


Claude Lévi-Strauss - 1962
    An examination of the structure of the thought of primitive' peoples, and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the way the human mind works.

Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School


C.J. Pascoe - 2007
    Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.

The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability


Susan Wendell - 1996
    Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified.Wendell provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness.

Vietnam Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir


W.D. Ehrhart - 1983
    Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam-Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a "page-turner"—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy


David Graeber - 2013
    He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.

The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist's Point of View


Tim Crane - 2017
    In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers." --James Ryerson, New York Times Book ReviewContemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate.An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists' basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists' conventional conception of religion emerges.The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.

The Experience of Place: A New Way of Looking at and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside


Anthony Hiss - 1990
    Why do some places--the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper--affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environments can radically alter the quality of our daily lives? The Experience of Place offers an innovative and delightfully readable proposal for new ways of planning, building, and managing our most immediate and overlooked surroundings.