Book picks similar to
Elusive Equality: Women's Rights, Public Policy, and the Law by Susan Gluck Mezey
women-s-rights
4-or-5-stars
american-politics
classics
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
Lizzie Skurnick - 2009
What's the point? There's so much else to read. With these essays, Lizzie Skurnick has answered those questions. It's as if a kindly psychiatrist suddenly appeared with a sheaf of missing brain scans. Does the mere mention of a mink-trimmed coat make you secretly swoon, even though you are rabidly anti-fur? You have 'A Little Princess' complex. Do you long to cover your enemies with leeches? You're having a 'Little House' flashback... So stretch out on Dr. Lizzie's couch and find out why you think it would be kind of cozy to be locked up in an attic with your brother. Or learn to dissect the subtle class consciousness of Judy Blume's New Jersey. Ponder the way that Lois Duncan's characters come into unexpected powers, natural and supernatural alike, as they enter adolesence. And most of all, enjoy.
Death Kit
Susan Sontag - 1967
Blending realism and dream, it offers a passionate exploration of the recesses of the American conscience.
The Inheritance
Jasmine Cresswell - 2000
The Inheritance by Jasmine Cresswell released on Apr 25, 2006 is available now for purchase.
Love and Mr. Lewisham
H.G. Wells - 1899
But when his former sweetheart, Ethel Henderson, re-enters his life his strictly regimented existence is thrown into chaos by the resurgence of old passion. Driven by overwhelming desire, he pursues Ethel passionately, only to find that while she returns his love she also hides a dark secret. For she is involved in a plot of trickery that goes against his firmest beliefs, working as an assistant to her stepfather - a cynical charlatan 'mystic' who earns his living by deluding the weak-willed with sly trickery.
New Passages
Gail Sheehy - 1995
Seven years ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle. . . People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die. A fifty-year-old woman--who remains free of cancer and heart disease-- can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Men, too, can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood--beginning at twenty-one and ending at sixty-five--are hopelessly out of date. In New Passages, Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier--a Second Adulthood in middle life."Stop and recalculate," Sheehy writes. "Imagine the day you turn forty-five as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity--beyond both male and female menopause. Through hundreds of personal and group interviews, national surveys of professionals and working-class people, and fresh findings extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports, Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages. Combining the scholar's ability to synthesize data with the novelist's gift for storytelling, she allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us.New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work is certain to awaken and permanently alter the way we think about ourselves."SHEEHY CLEARLY STATES IDEAS ABOUT LIFE THAT HAVE NEVER BEFORE BEEN AS CLEARLY STATED."--Los Angeles Times Book Review"AN OPTIMISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT IN PESSIMISTIC TIMES. . . It is grounded in the economic and psychological realities that make adult life so complex today."--The New York Times Book Review
The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11
John Farmer - 2009
As one of the primary authors of the 9/11 Commission Report, John Farmer is proud of his and his colleagues? work. Yet he came away from the experience convinced that there was a further story to be told, one he was uniquely qualified to write. Now that story can be told. Tape recordings, transcripts, and contemporaneous records that had been classified have since been declassified, and the inspector general?s investigations of government conduct have been completed. Drawing on his knowledge of those sources, as well as his years as an attorney in public and private practice, Farmer reconstructs the truth of what happened on that fateful day and the disastrous circumstances that allowed it: the institutionalized disconnect between what those on the ground knew and what those in power did. He details ?terrifyingly and illuminatingly?the key moments in the years, months, weeks, and days that preceded the attacks, then descends almost in real time through the attacks themselves, portraying them as they have never before been seen. Ultimately, Farmer builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version not only is almost entirely untrue but serves to create a false impression of order and security. The ground truth that Farmer captures suggests a very different scenario?one that is doomed to be repeated unless the systemic failures he reveals are confronted and remedied.
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
Hélène Greven-Borde - 1998
This is not the novel The Handmaid's Tale.
The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, revisits the Anglo-American utopian/dystopian tradition. Appealing to imaginative fiction and the novel of ideas, the construction of perfect - or nightmarish - worlds rouses the reader's socio-political awareness of the present and invites questions on the shape of the near furure. The Handmaid's Tale deconstructs the utopian narrative by breaking the chronological order of the female protagonist's experience into a time-shifting testimony, a quest for meaning and an exploration of self versus the other. The intricate play on word and symbol can be read against the historical background of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism, as well as the twentieth-century New Right and women's rights movements, while inviting reference to the postmodernist outlook. This volume includes a bibliography, a study of the book's context, as well as essays and commentaries; the approach has been adapted to the needs of Capes and Agregation students.
Brother to a Dragonfly
Will D. Campbell - 1977
One is of his youth in rural Mississippi and his devotion to his brother whose life ended in seeming tragedy. The other tells of his ordination at age 17 and gradual realization that civil rightsfor blacks, for women, for gays was an essential part of a ministry that has not yet ended.
Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies
Laura Thompson - 2022
Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife’s inheritance was the property of her husband, making her vulnerable to kidnap, forced marriages, even confinement in an asylum. And in modern times, heiresses fell victim to fortune-hunters who squandered their millions.Heiresses tells the stories of these million dollar babies: Mary Davies, who inherited London’s most valuable real estate, and was bartered from the age of twelve; Consuelo Vanderbilt, the original American “Dollar Heiress”, forced into a loveless marriage; Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress who married seven times and died almost penniless; and Patty Hearst, heiress to a newspaper fortune who was arrested for terrorism. However, there are also stories of independence and achievement: Angela Burdett-Coutts, who became one of the greatest philanthropists of Victorian England; Nancy Cunard, who lived off her mother's fortune and became a pioneer of the civil rights movement; and Daisy Fellowes, elegant linchpin of interwar high society and noted fashion editor.Heiresses is about the lives of the rich, who—as F. Scott Fitzgerald said—are ‘different’. But it is also a bigger story about how all women fought their way to equality, and sometimes even found autonomy and fulfillment.
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
Maya Angelou - 1996
In her unique, spellbinding way, she re-creates intimate personal experiences and gives us her wisdom on a wide variety of subjects. She tells us how a house can both hurt its occupants and heal them. She talks about Africa. She gives us a profile of Oprah. She enlightens us about age and sexuality. She confesses to the problems fame brings and shares with us the indelible lessons she has learned about rage and violence. And she sings the praises of sensuality.
The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke
Elizabeth Warren - 2003
Although this social revolution created a firestorm of controversy, no one questioned the idea that women's involvement in the workforce was certain to improve families' financial lot. Until now.In this brilliantly argued book, Harvard Law School bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren and business consultant Amelia Tyagi show that today's middle-class parents are suffering from an unprecedented and totally unexpected economic meltdown. Astonishingly, sending mothers to work has made families more vulnerable than ever before. Today's two-income family earns 75% more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago, but actually has less discretionary income once their fixed monthly bills are paid.How did this happen? Warren and Tyagi provide convincing evidence that the culprit is not "overconsumption," as many critics have charged. Instead, they point to the ferocious bidding war for housing and education that has quietly engulfed America's suburbs. Stay-at-home mothers once provided a financial safety net if disaster struck; their move into the workforce has left today's families chillingly at risk. The authors show why the usual remedies--child-support enforcement, subsidized daycare, and higher salaries for women--won't solve the problem, and propose a set of innovative solutions, from rate caps on credit cards to open-access public schools, to restore security to the middle class.
The Whale Rider
Witi Ihimaera - 1987
But he's focused on his duties as chief of the Maori in Whangara, New Zealand—a tribe that claims descent from the legendary "whale rider." In every generation since the whale rider, a male has inherited the title of chief. But now there is no male heir—there's only Kahu. She should be next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl. Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle she has a unique ally: the whale rider himself, from whom she has inherited the ability to communicate with whales. Once that sacred gift is revealed, Kahu may be able to reestablish her people's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention—and lead her tribe to a bold new future.
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan - 1963
Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of “the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why
Alexandra Petri - 2020
Q-Anon makes perfect sense! Perhaps the abyss is staring back at you because your outfit looks extra nice today! At the center of the book is a virtuosic account of the past four years, a history as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself. This Panglossian venture into the swampy present will soothe—and terrify—readers who have died laughing to ClickHole, the Onion, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, or Veep.
Ways of Seeing
John Berger - 1972
First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has."Berger has the ability to cut right through the mystification of the professional art critics . . . He is a liberator of images: and once we have allowed the paintings to work on us directly, we are in a much better position to make a meaningful evaluation" —Peter Fuller, Arts Review"The influence of the series and the book . . . was enormous . . . It opened up for general attention to areas of cultural study that are now commonplace" —Geoff Dyer in Ways of TellingWinner of the 1972 Booker Prize for his novel, G., John Peter Berger (born November 5th, 1926) is an art critic, painter and author of many novels including A Painter of Our Time, From A to X and Bento’s Sketchbook.