The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom


Miguel Ruiz - 1997
    Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, the Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. The Four Agreements are: Be Impeccable With Your Word, Don't Take Anything Personally, Don't Make Assumptions, Always Do Your Best.

The Book of Thoth


Aleister Crowley - 1944
    This is the definitive study of the Egyptian tarot and is used as a key to all Western mystery disciplines. Color plates of eight cards.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America


Laila Lalami - 2020
    citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth--such as national origin, race, and gender--that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still their shadows today.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals


Alexis Pauline Gumbs - 2020
    Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

The Yugas: Keys to Understanding Our Hidden Past, Emerging Present and Future Enlightenment


Joseph Selbie - 2010
    Today's view of history cannot account for ancient anomalies, such as the Pyramids and advanced knowledge contained in India's Vedas-but in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past, but for the trends of today and for our future enlightenment-the 24,000 year yuga cycle

A Little Bit of Astrology: An Introduction to the Zodiac


Colin Bedell - 2018
       Explore the zodiac, and see how it affects your life! Astrology is an ancient art in which the movements of the stars and planets can divine the future. Find out more about the practice, its history, and each of the 12 sun signs—and then follow the detailed information on how to create a natal chart and use it to craft personalized horoscopes.

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot


Mikki Kendall - 2020
    Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals


Saidiya Hartman - 1997
    Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage. Hartman narrates the story of this radical social transformation against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship that were indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work.Beautifully written and deeply researched, Wayward Lives recreates the experience of young urban black women who desired an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them—domestic service, second-class citizenship, and respectable poverty—and whose intimate revolution was apprehended as crime and pathology. For the first time, young black women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor


Layla F. Saad - 2020
    She encouraged people to own up and share their racist behaviors, big and small. She was looking for truth, and she got it. Thousands of people participated in the challenge, and over 90,000 people downloaded the Me and White Supremacy Workbook.The updated and expanded Me and White Supremacy takes the work deeper by adding more historical and cultural contexts, sharing moving stories and anecdotes, and including expanded definitions, examples, and further resources.Awareness leads to action, and action leads to change. The numbers show that readers are ready to do this work - let's give it to them.

Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells, and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance


Ariel Gore - 2019
    Today's wizarding women are raising hell, exorcising haters, and revving up to fight fire with a fierce inferno of magical outrage.Magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised, and in Hexing the Patriarchy, author Ariel Gore offers a playbook for the feminist uprising. Full of incantations, enchantments, rituals, and witchy wisdom designed protect women and bring down The Man, readers will learn how to . . . Make salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshitMix potions to run abusive liars out of townUse their bare hands and feet to vanquish bro cultureConjure dead relatives to help smash the system. . . and more.From summoning Ancestors to leveraging the Zodiac, these twenty-six alphabetically inspired spells are ready-made recipes for toppling the patriarchy with a dangerously divine, they-never-saw-it-coming power.

All the Young Men


Ruth Coker Burks - 2020
    She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she's done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies - often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.

The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects


Barbara G. Walker - 1988
    Sticking out the tongue is still a polite sign of greeting in northern India and Tibet (see Body Parts).Cosmic Egg In ancient times the primeval universe-or the Great Mother-took the form of an egg. It carried all numbers and letters within an ellipse, to show that everything is contained within one form at the beginning (see Round and Oval Motifs).

The History of White People


Nell Irvin Painter - 2010
    Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time. A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history. 70 illustrations.

Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves


Claire Comstock-Gay - 2020
    The stars and the planets then are more like mirrors that show us who we are, that give us an understanding of how to be and how to move through the world; how certain people do it differently, and what we can learn by studying them.In Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, Claire Comstock-Gay brings the sky down to Earth and points to our popular “stars”—from Aretha Franklin to Mr. Rogers, from poets in Cancer to punk singers in Scorpio—to reveal what the sky has to teach us about being human. In this wise, lyrically written guide, she examines the twelve astrological signs, illuminating the ways each one is more complicated, beautiful, and surprising than you might have been told. Claire suggests that actually it’s okay, and even important, to be a seeker, to hunger for self-knowledge, and if astrology is the vehicle for that inquiry, so be it.Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars offers a clear introduction to the basics and an innovative new framework for creatively using astrology to illuminate our lives on earth. It’s a road map to our internal world, yes, but Claire also reminds us that it’s still our job to navigate it. Combining both heavenly insights and the earthly wisdom of writers like Cheryl Strayed and Heather Havrilesky and the poetry of Patricia Lockwood and Mary Oliver, Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars offers a fresh, profound, and fun way to look at ourselves and others, and perhaps see each more clearly. And in that way, this book is not just beautiful, but transformative.