Focusing on Huli “passenger women,” (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of “prostitution” and “sex work,” Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated “olsem maket” (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming “wayward.” Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women’s own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.

    So the next time the fates collide and you're reminded of what a small world it can be, you'll realize we're all victims of coincidence ...

    A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.

     August 2014: ISIS continues its reign of terror, conquering new areas in Iraq and Syria, leaving tens of thousands of dead and millions displaced in their homelands. International news shows gruesome images of massacres and ethnic cleansing. A horrified Norwegian soldier at Camp Rena, shocked by Norway’s unwillingness to commit troops to eradicate the terrorists, decides to take matters into his own hands and travels to the Kurdish front line in Iraq.

In this gripping memoir, Mike Peshmerganor recounts how his Kurdish heritage, liberal Norwegian upbringing and military training shaped his worldview and drew him into the fight against militant Islamism. Armed only with gear he purchased himself and the name of a Kurdish contact, Mike is thrust into a military culture completely foreign to Westerners; where soldiers work without pay, adequate food and even ammunition, and their revered leader is a former hitman. Here are dramatic firefights against the world’s most feared terrorist organization, and insight into the mindset of a true warrior. Mike Peshmerganor is a pseudonym. He escaped from Kurdistan as an infant with his family, grew up in Eastern Norway and served in Norway’s elite Telemark Battalion. "I couldn’t think of a single better reason for the government to send troops abroad than to stop an ongoing genocide. And what about all the foreign fighters from Europe who fought for ISIS? Didn’t we have a responsibility to stop our own citizens from actively perpetrating war crimes and other atrocities in Iraq? Who will prevent them from returning home and carrying out terrorist attacks here, in
our own cities? I realized it was futile to wait for Norway to engage directly in the fight against ISIS. I had to do it on my own."

    Taking a wholly different view, Asma Barlas develops a believer's reading of the Qur'an that demonstrates the radically egalitarian and antipatriarchal nature of its teachings.Beginning with a historical analysis of religious authority and knowledge, Barlas shows how Muslims came to read inequality and patriarchy into the Qur'an to justify existing religious and social structures and demonstrates that the patriarchal meanings ascribed to the Qur'an are a function of who has read it, how, and in what contexts. She goes on to reread the Qur'an's position on a variety of issues in order to argue that its teachings do not support patriarchy. To the contrary, Barlas convincingly asserts that the Qur'an affirms the complete equality of the sexes, thereby offering an opportunity to theorize radical sexual equality from within the framework of its teachings. This new view takes readers into the heart of Islamic teachings on women, gender, and patriarchy, allowing them to understand Islam through its most sacred scripture, rather than through Muslim cultural practices or Western media stereotypes.

    Yet that dramatic moment was merely the pinnacle of a career throughout which she was hailed as a pioneering reformer.As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn't clever enough to study history. She became the most senior judge in the country.How does a self-professed 'girly swot' get ahead in a profession dominated by men? A lifelong smasher of glass-ceilings, who took as her motto 'women are equal to everything', her landmark rulings in areas including domestic violence, divorce, mental health and equality were her attempt to correct that.

    He warns that great case must be taken in this day of search and upheaval to examine the prevailing movements that promise solutions for humanity.Marxism, which holds special appeal for the world's oppressed peoples and those sensitive to their suffering because of its emphasis on justice, merits particularly close scrutiny. Shari'ati analyzes its roots in materialism, its relation to the Hegelian dialectric, its preoccupation with matters of production, the sources of its diametrical opposition to Islam, Marx's objection to religion, and other crucial aspects to Marxism.But his attention is not confined to Marxism alone. He discusses the established religions, bourgeois liberalism, and existentialism, beginning with their fundamental notions of man. He examines the characteristic refusal of the major freedom-seeking movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centures to accept any spiritual dimension in man. Throughout hs inquiry, Shari'ati offers comparisons with the ideology of Islam, drawing upon the principles and precepts contained in the Qur'an as well as cultural material from the history of Islamic society. Gradually and eloquently, he expounds his persoai view of Islam as the philosophy of human liberation.

    The Rape of Nanking, or Nanking Massacre, in which at least 369,366 people were slaughtered and 80,000 women were raped by Japanese invasion troops, has become little more than a historical footnote in the West. The horror began on the morning of December 13, 1937, when the Japanese Imperial Army captured Nanking (Nanjing), which was then China's capital. Soldiers went through the streets indiscriminately killing Chinese men, women, and children without apparent provocation or excuse until in places the streets and alleys were littered with the bodies of their victims. Thousands of women were raped by Japanese soldiers; death was frequently the penalty for the slightest resistance by a victim or members of her family. Even large numbers of young girls and old women were raped throughout the city, and many cases of abnormal and sadistic behavior in connection with these rapes were reported. Many women were killed after the act and their bodies mutilated. For the next six weeks, while horrific rape continued, wholesale murder of male civilians was conducted with the apparent sanction of the Japanese high command. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and disarmed ex-soldiers were arrayed in formation, their hands bound behind their backs, and marched outside the city wall where, in groups, they were beheaded, or buried alive, or bayoneted, or raked with machine-gun fire, or doused with gasoline and burned. This book, using more than 400 historical photographs, many of which were taken by Japanese soldiers themselves, is published to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Rape of Nanking, to remind the world of the forgotten holocaust of WWII, and to honor history and answer any attempt to deny or change it.

    Because it is in first person, the reader directly sees the psychological impact of the abuse and comes to understand how the abuser manipulates the victim into cooperating in it. We see the psychological costs of being abused—denial, depression, mental splitting, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, alcohol abuse, hopelessness, shame, fear of harm to her family—but gradually we also experience Laila's struggle. Set in the context of Muslim society where the young female victim knows her word will not be believed in preference to that of her "good" Muslim father, the story could have happened anywhere. Yes, the details are shocking, but they are not prurient, as the negative reviews have suggested. They are sickening and saddening but they are real. The details serve to underline the horrible things that abusers do to kids. I learned much about how the relationship between abuser and victim works and why it is so hard for the victim to break away and recover. This story is all the more moving because it is true. It took great courage for Laila to expose her life in this way, even if she does use a pseudonym. Her opening explanation for why she wrote the book reveals her hope that at least one abused individual will read it and live a healthy, happy life after the horrific experiences of such a childhood.Synopsis: Not Easily Washed Away is the true story of a young girl who was born to a Muslim family in Pakistan. She suffered through sexual, mental and physical abuse for fifteen years, which was perpetrated by her father Abdulla. Laila decides to take advantage of her father’s incestuous addiction by having him acquire a visa for her to the United States, where she feels as if she can rid herself of a putrid past. The book is written from a psychological perspective in first person, as Laila shares her painful past with the reader, sparing no details of her ordeal as a child, teenager and young adult. After she realizes her father’s diabolical plan is to keep her in Pakistan for himself, Laila decides to take fate into her own hands. Her new attitude helps her to turn the tables on her father, now living in America, and manipulate him into marrying an American woman to get Laila’s visa to the United States.The United States is not the instantaneous answer to Laila's plight. She arrived in Seattle, Washington, in 2004 to start a new life away from her father, but ends up being unable to stop the incestuous relationship with him and later on, with her stepmother. Things get even worse for Laila, as she is now twenty years old, depressed, and worried that her family’s fate back in Pakistan might be jeopardized if she leaves home. In the Spring of 2007 Laila’s life changes when her younger sister arrived from Pakistan and when she meets an interesting, Christian, Jamaican man at school. The young man confronts Laila about the abuse, and when she realizes she has feelings for him, she tells him everything. The young man tries to convince Laila that she can become mentally stronger and free herself of her abusive father and stepmother by running away with him.

    In the normal condition the two look the same, but in this disorder one is malformed and shrunken beyond recognition. The result is a shortened life span, higher mortality at all ages, an inability to reproduce, premature hair loss, and brain defects variously resulting in attention deficit, hyperactivity, conduct disorder, hypersexuality, and an enormous excess of both outward and self-directed aggression.It is called maleness.Melvin Konner traces the arc of evolution to explain the relationships between women and men. With patience and wit he explores the knotty question of whether men are necessary in the biological destiny of the human race. He draws on multiple, colorful examples from the natural world — such as the mating habits of the octopus, black widow, angler fish, and jacana — and argues that maleness in humans is hardly necessary to the survival of the species.In characteristically humorous and engaging prose, Konner sheds light on our biologically different identities, while noting the poignant exceptions that challenge the male/female divide. We meet hunter-gatherers such as those in Botswana, whose culture gave women a prominent place, invented the working mother, and respected women’s voices around the fire. Recent human history has upset this balance, as a dense world of war fostered extreme male dominance. But our species has been recovering over the past two centuries, and an unstoppable move toward equality is afoot. It will not be the end of men, but it will be the end of male supremacy and a better, wiser world for women and men alike.

    From Tehran to Melbourne, a powerful memoir of survival.Scattered Pearls opens in pre-revolutionary Iran, where Sohila Zanjani grew up under the threat of violence, intimidation and control at the hands of her father. Resolving never to tread in the footsteps of her mother and her grandmother, both survivors of domestic abuse, Sohila tried to find a new life for herself on the other side of the world. But to her horror she discovered that living with her father had been gentle in comparison to the reality of her new married life.Spanning more than a hundred years, Scattered Pearls tells the true stories of Sohila, her mother and her grandmother, and the injustice and abuse meted out by the men in their lives. It is a story of cultural misogyny in both Iran and Australia, and of an ongoing search for a loving, equal relationship.Along the way the book provides a glimpse into the lives of ‘ordinary’ Iranians and the power of the Persian culture. It’s also a confronting insight into what can go on behind closed doors – even in an ‘advanced’ society.But at its heart, Scattered Pearls is a story of resilience and personal growth, and of allowing the future to blossom in spite of the damage of the past. It is one of optimism, courage, and love and hope.This is the story of three women, but it carries with it the stories of an entire culture.

    Considering the huge impact of modernity on the region, and the accompanying shockwaves that turned society upside-down, Kassir states that the current crisis in Arab identity lies in the failure to come to terms with modernity, turning instead to false solutions such as pan-Arabism and Islamism.Being Arab is a clarion call, urging Arabs to embrace their own history, to reject Western double standards and Islamism alike, and to take the future of the region into their own hands.

    Threatened by the draft in the late sixties, he enlisted in the Army to avoid becoming a grunt, yet ended up one anyway. He endured a grueling war in Vietnam and then returned to a country too angry to care. While his journey took unexpected turns, his choices got him there, so he did his best to react positively and keep moving forward.Udden delivers his story in a comfortable, friendly style. He conveys the experiences of basic training, advanced infantry training, and what it was like to live, work, guard, patrol, and fight in the jungle. The reader will feel the adrenalin rush of a firefight, the thrill of a wild ride dangling below a helicopter, and the humor in celebrating his 21st birthday on a firebase.Through his words and personal photographs, you will live through his journey exactly as he experienced it.

    Profiles of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony provide insights into the origins of the movement, while reflections from Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Geraldine Ferraro, and others reveal the passion and dedication required to maintain progress in the continuing struggle for women’s equality. © 2012 HighBridge Audio

    The United States and Iran have long eyed each other with suspicion, all too eager to jump to conclusions and slam the door. What gets lost along the way is a sense of what is actually happening inside Iran and why it matters. With a new hard-line Iranian president making incendiary pronouncements and pressing for nuclear developments, the consequences of not understanding Iran have never been higher.Ray Takeyh, a leading expert on Iran's politics and history, has written a groundbreaking book that demystifies the Iranian regime and shows how the fault lines of Iran's domestic politics serve to explain its behavior. In "Hidden Iran," he explains why this country has so often confounded American expectations and why its outward hostility does not necessarily preclude the normalization of relations. Through a clearer understanding of the competing claims of Muslim theology, republican pragmatism, and factional competition, he offers a new paradigm for managing our relations with this rising power.